A history of job changes could be a red flag on a résumé, or it could signal a job candidate with an important "mobility benefit" that will help them begin a new job, says new research from Rebecca Kehoe, professor of Human Resources Studies in Cornell's ILR School.
"People experience a decline in performance when they change organizations, but eventually they are bouncing back," said Kehoe. "We were interested in better understanding the implications of these experiences over time."
How to talk about job moves
- Be strategic about how you frame prior experience
- Articulate any hidden skills you've learned
- Show that you can adapt and navigate different social contexts
- Quantify past success coming up to speed quickly in previous jobs
Kehoe found that the more often a person starts a new job, the better they get at it: Their initial performance drops less, and they come up to speed more quickly.
Kehoe is first author of "Movin' and Groovin'! Increased Prior Mobility Facilitates Newcomers' Transitions Into Organizations," published by the Academy of Management Journal in March. Her co-author was F. Scott Bentley, assistant professor at Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations.
"Employees are moving more often than ever before. Organizations are losing people more quickly and having to hire more often. This is costly. We think it's interesting that there is a silver lining to employees who have moved around a lot." Kehoe said.
The research also revealed that the mobility benefit is amplified after a job move to a significantly different workplace culture or to a workplace where colleagues have been established for a long time. "The bigger the shock you'd expect somebody to experience coming into a new organization, the more benefit they're going to have from moving around more frequently previously. They're better equipped to figure out what's new and to adapt their behaviors to adjust," Kehoe said.
Another situation in which the mobility benefit leads to a less significant performance drop is a new job that requires a lot of collaboration. "You can't hide by yourself in your office and pretend that you're in a bubble," Kehoe said. However, in these more collaborative roles, job hoppers did not recover to their prior performance levels more quickly than others.
The researchers analyzed monthly data on job moves and the performance of over 8,500 hedge fund managers across more than 2,000 firms in the U.S. over a 15-year period, using mobility information dating back approximately another decade. They chose hedge funds because these firms generally adhere to clearly defined job titles and responsibilities and share a goal of maximizing returns on invested capital. This enabled the comparison of roles, responsibilities and performance metrics across individuals and firms. In addition, fund managers often have significant discretion in their roles, so there is a strong correspondence between a manager's contribution and their investment returns.
To assess performance, the researchers used a fund's Sortino ratio, which is a measure of performance that reflects investment returns.
A new fund manager from a different firm will bring transferable job skills that they can use in their new role, which is a benefit; however, they will also have learned firm-specific social conventions from their prior organization that they may need to unlearn or adjust. The researchers found that the skill of learning and adapting to the social landscape of a new organization is a form of general, transferable "human capital" that people accumulate and carry with them as they change jobs.
An important takeaway from the research is that job hoppers have a strong mobility benefit that may serve organizations particularly well in certain hiring contexts. According to Kehoe, hiring managers should "favor them in roles where coming up to speed quickly and being effective from the outset is a win." This is especially important for highly collaborative roles or for jobs where the newcomer will join a longstanding group of colleagues.
This mobility benefit may also be relevant for large organizations transferring employees to different locations. If adjusting quickly is not important, a transfer may help employees gain skills in adjusting to new work contexts, but if adjusting quickly is important, the organization should favor employees with more job-changing experience.
For individuals, the research "sheds new light on the importance of different types of learning that we experience and carry with us over the course of our careers," Kehoe said.
Tonya Engst is a writer for the ILR School.
