Longevity should no longer be a leading hiring indicator

“The idea of tenure and retention is something we should probably let go. We’re going to work a long time and people are going to have lots of different roles in their lives. I think we’re going to start to, as companies that move fast, really appreciate employees who have a lot of different experiences at a lot of different organizations, and that’s going to be collateral that’s as important as tenure.” -Patty McCord, former Netflix Chief Talent Officer (Co-author of the famous Netflix Culture Deck).

I could not agree more. Over the past eight years or so I have noticed some disparity as I have hired people into the companies I supported. The disparity I noticed was behavioral and entirely in what I observed in the hiring manager’s behavior.

The disparity concerned longevity. Hiring managers prized it, and no matter where I went, each had the same attitude. The longer someone stayed at his or her previous company the better. Three years and up was ideal.

I found it ironic that they would speak about it with conviction, as being an indicator of quality, when they worked with someone (me) who had only had two positions across his 15+ year career with that duration.

At the same time, across my career as a recruiter, I have found more opportunity to learn and grow (in both skills acquired and ideas and process I was exposed to) as a recruiting consultant in those series of shorter stints than I may have had as a full-time employee.

I initially entered the corporate world without a college degree, so had to earn my way in via collections and then as soon as I could customer service. After about three years of experience in customer service, I discovered recruiting at a job fair because the agency owner I met liked the sound of my voice.

For the last 15 years, I’ve worked a large variety of recruiting consulting assignments that generally ranged from 9 months to 18 months. Over time contracting has become a big thing in the recruiting world as companies have needed the ability to turn recruiting on and off depending on demand.

What I’ve loved about consulting is the ability to jump from being a full life cycle recruiter to working on large-scale hiring projects for corporations to executive global recruiting or to now where I help build out recruiting departments.

I’ve even worked myself out of a job (three times) by completing projects ahead of schedule. The companies were very grateful, but inadvertently it ended up affecting me for years to come. I had to keep explaining this to each potential client who came after.

During the course of my work I have interviewed thousands of people and asked those same questions “Why did you leave that role?” and heard every variant of the answer.

I’ve interviewed people who are passionate and experts in their field, but have been saddled with a few sub one-year positions for a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with performance.

A recruiting leader, who came to silicon valley to work for a big tech company told me about the day, at their 6 month mark, that a large group of he and his coworkers were brought into an auditorium and congratulated for having hit 150% of their goal, and wildly outperforming what was expected of them.

The next sentence was, ‘thank you so much for your help with this, but unfortunately, today will be your last day.’

Contracting has elements in other functions as well, and generally around the more transitional parts of different functions (like ERP consultants customizing modules for a company, or different more transactional areas of finance, operations, customer service and sales).

With the advent of the gig economy and 1099 employment on the rise, longevity in work history is quickly becoming an outdated point of reference to indicate the quality of a potential new hire.

Over the last 7 years or so I’ve found myself pushing back on managers more and more when they objected due to longevity issues.

As someone with a “jumpy” personal background, I am here to tell you that if you disqualify a candidate based on that reason you are going to miss out on some excellent people.

During interviews probe for why a person left each position and listen to their answer.

If they begin blaming other people, the previous company, or get defensive, take that as a data point that there may be some personal issues in play.

However, if the answer you get back is a sincere one, with a explanation that includes the words: “restructuring, reorganizing, new leadership, contract role, consulting opportunity, or short-term assignment” don’t penalize the person for things that may have been out of their control, or even their decision to take on a variety of positions to increase their knowledge and skill sets.

Instead, focus on:

Do they give good data about why they are the best person for the role on their resume?

How closely does their previous experience align with the role?

Are they someone who can grow and be an asset to your company down the road?

How knowledgeable were they about your company and the opportunity?

Give it a try.

Give someone whom you might not normally a second look and a chance to speak with you about a role.

Focus less on the month/year-month/year and more on:

The data in the bullet points (or lack of it), how the resume is formatted (you can tell someone with hustle by the way they market themselves), and how they conduct themselves in their in-person interview with you.

If you do all these things I would bet that you will, over time, see a decrease in attrition and improvements in performance and productivity.

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