Soft Skills

Warning for job-hopping senior executives

Vikram Bhardwaj explains why senior professionals should refrain from changing jobs too frequently.

A Vice-President Operations at a large captive American BPO in Hyderabad quits in 2001 to join a third party set up in Delhi as COO. His family continues to be in Hyderabad. In March 2002, the person quits. Reason cited: business was not growing as envisaged. He is without a job for the next eight months and then finally joins as COO of a large IT company’s BPO. The individual quits this company in October 2004 and moves on as Head of Operations in a smaller KPO. Reason cited: KPO is an exciting play. March 2006: Last heard, the person is no longer with the company.

A VP HR from a large MNC in Delhi moves on to Head HR at a large pharma company. The role title offered and compensation was a huge draw. Within a year, he quit and joined a BPO company as HR Head. Reason: wanted to be with family in Mumbai. He is again on the lookout for a better opportunity, since the job involves late conference calls and the consequent disruption in the work-life balance.

These are not stray incidents worth ignoring. Increasingly, senior professionals are falling in the trap of frequently changing jobs. This is no longer restricted to entry level coders or programmers. Willingly, senior professionals with excellent credentials are changing jobs more frequently than ever before. In a tight suppliers market which exists in India today, with every company worth its weight wanting to hire people and willing to better any salaries, quick career moves are often the result of so called ‘exciting’ opportunities that professionals find it hard to pass-by—even at the risk of creating a perception of job-hopping.

If one would ask anyone in the know, jumping jobs especially in sectors like IT or BPO has reached a record high. In mature economies, a senior professional would change a job every four to five years. Thanks to the job market boom in India, people are changing jobs with regular precision, with salaries statistically multiplying with every move. For many, every 15 months, it’s on to a new job!

What these people don’t realise or overlook is the fact that frequently changing jobs is a serious impediment even to their mid to long-term career growth. Companies want to see stability in a person’s profile. If he has a history of jumping around, the company fears that he will ‘jump’ for the first opportunity that shows itself. If you’re positioning yourself as a mature professional, a job change every year isn’t going to be received well with most employers.

Frequent moves show either a lack of judgement or confused career goals or both. To some hiring managers, job-hopping also indicates that the candidate is not wise enough to see the negative connotation rapid moves have with the next employer and that suggests immaturity. In most cases, they are seen to lack a sense of commitment and loyalty to any organisation they have been a part of. The habit would be difficult to manage and therefore would be a recurring issue.

At the senior levels, only when a person stays in the role with the employer for a few years would he/she develop the necessary skills, work in a team, build interpersonal relationships and consequently excel in the function. Going through a few business cycles as a part of one collective unit is important for one to derive organisational and team synergies. This aspect may not show up in the formative years as much as it does when the executive holds a position of importance.

Statistically and objectively, a generalisation cannot be made as to how long should one stay with an employer, and how many employers can one afford to work for before being labelled as a “job-hopper”. One would refrain from even hazarding a guess—whether two or three years in a company—the topic is open for a debate. Even if the number is lower for your previous stints, one should at least have four years or more with the latest employer, this could in many ways square-up the previous instability.

Increasingly, one is observing that there is starting to exist an across the board reluctance to hire job-hoppers in the senior executive ranks. This is more so for any blue-chip company, be it an Indian firm or a multi-national. Rather than make oneself un-employable by changing jobs frequently, one could rather focus on making a dent on the role or the function in the process, making one’s skills irreplaceable for the employer to directly value the person’s presence.

Vikram Bhardwaj is a Partner with Redileon.
E-mail: vishwanath_mum@tatamcgraw-hill.com