Pranav Ravikumar has held three jobs since college, and he’s only 24. One month after graduating in December 2020, he cycled through two rotations of a management training program at the pharmaceutical company Abbott. Mr. Ravikumar became an e-commerce analyst, but he wanted the kind of faster-paced work found at consulting firms and start-ups. The job at Abbott also required him to move to Columbus, Ohio, far from family and friends in Washington, D.C.
In October 2021, Mr. Ravikumar left Abbott for a remote job with Dragonfly, a start-up that acquires and develops small e-commerce businesses, and moved back to Washington. A few months in, he spoke to his manager about becoming more involved with strategy, but nothing changed. So a year later, Mr. Ravikumar began job hunting. This February, he started a job in product marketing at Alma, a membership network that helps mental health care providers build their practices.
For Mr. Ravikumar, this kind of rapid job hopping has been a positive experience. “I’ve almost doubled what my starting salary was at Abbott, and that’s important to me,” he said. “I really wanted the flexibility of remote work and I’d be hard-pressed now to give that up. And I’ve gotten a lot of professional experience across industries super quickly.”
Job hopping to increase salary and skills early in a career — historically, a red flag for employers — is not new. However, it appears to be increasingly common: 22.3 percent of workers ages 20 and older spent a year or less at their jobs in 2022, the highest percentage with a tenure that short since 2006, according to data from the Employee Benefit Research Institute, an independent nonprofit. About 33 percent spent two years or less at their jobsBut many Gen Z workers, and younger Millennials, aren’t worried. Seventy-four percent of 18- to 26-year-olds and 62 percent of 27- to 42-year-olds were searching for a new job or planned to search in the next six months, according to a survey of U.S. employees conducted in May by Robert Half, a human resources consultancy.
Dawn Fay, operational president for talent solutions and business consulting at Robert Half, said in an email that the survey also asked hiring managers their top concerns when evaluating a candidate’s résumé: 77 percent named job hopping.
Jeff Hyman, chief executive of Recruit Rockstars, a recruitment firm in Chicago, described job hopping as a “huge headache” for employers. When promising employees leave prematurely, others may wonder why, or follow suit, he said. “Human resources executives keep hoping it will improve, but it just seems to get worse by the month.”
After just eight months at her corporate job in Pittsburgh, Erin Confortini, 24, was being recruited for similar jobs paying $20,000 a year more, but declined to pursue them, feeling the salary wasn’t worth the risks of changing course. Ms. Confortini, who now earns additional income as a personal finance influencer on TikTok with over 246,000 followers, posted about her decision not to job hop. (As it turned out, she left the corporate job a year later to work at a start-up.) The post received more than 450 comments, with most advising her to follow the money rather than be loyal to a company (“fear should not drive decisions,” read one).
While she understands this position, Ms. Confortini said, “I also think you need to consider what that will look like on your résumé.”
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