The narrative is familiar by now: job-hopping is increasingly common in the United States, while long-term employment relationships are hard to establish. But new research shows that the story is much more complicated; in fact, looking at the overall economy, business leaders of a generation ago would have envied the low job switching rates that U.S. companies enjoy today. So to increase employee loyalty, savvy hiring managers need to move past common myths about job tenure and focus on the story the data is actually telling. Only then can they design truly successful retention strategies.
Your Employees Are More Loyal Than You Think
Business leaders of previous generations would envy today’s low job-hopping rates.
March 16, 2020
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Summary.
The narrative is familiar by now: job-hopping is increasingly common in the United States, while long-term employment relationships are hard to establish. But new research shows that the story is more complicated. A recent NBER working paper shows that the share of workers with less than one year of tenure fell from 18-20 percent in the 1980s and 1990s to about 16 percent in recent years. At the same time the share of workers with more than 20 years of tenure has increased from 8-9 percent in the 1980s and 1990s to about 10 percent in recent years. Why is the perception of increased job-hopping so widespread? The first reason is one highly visible cohort — male employees — do in fact stay with their employer for shorter periods of time. The second key reason for why employees are perceived as switching jobs more frequently is the generational narrative, branding millennials as the job hopping generation. A number of recent studies and surveys refute this view, but perception can take a long time to change.