After reading this posting this afternoon, I couldn’t help responding a little to this:

Must have career stability ie: they do not want job hoppers ……they want a long term commitment someone that will grow and shape team

As far as I’m concerned, very few people “hop” jobs because they think job hopping is a good strategy. Switching jobs is pretty stressful for most people, and they tend to do it for one (and often both) of two strong reasons:

He/She isn’t happy where he/she is. He/She has a “better offer”.

Unhappy

Most people have had a job they weren’t happy with. Many of you are probably holding a position you’re not enthusiastic about right now. When you see problems occurring in your work environment, you have a few choices that can be grouped roughly like this:

Accept that your company has problems, and you can live with that.

Accept that the company has problems, and try and fix them.

Accept that the company has problems, that you can’t fix them, and that it’s time to find another option.

Most people can’t stay in the middle category for much time without progress. If you’re seeing problems and you aren’t making progress against those problems, you have to decide if you can live with those problems or if you have to leave. The threshold at which you choose to leave depends on the problems and on the employee; I’ve met employees that treat their job as just a job and expect it to be flawed, and I’ve met others who strive constantly to find that ‘perfect job.’

Fortunately, there’s also a counteracting factor at work: new employees have high hopes and haven’t yet started to bruse those hopes against consistent recurring problems. This means that many people will go anywhere from a few months to a year before the issues start to rankle. As with the threshold for leaving, the threshold after which the bloom comes off the rose varies significantly from employee to employee and company to company.

Some people get into a pattern of several hops for a while. In rare cases, this goes deeper, and it’s an unwillingness to commit, a feeling (accurate or not) of inadequacy, or someone truly incapable of registering that the grass only seems greener on the other side. Mostly, however, it’s the fact that finding the right fit between you and a company is a hard thing to do.

The Better Offer

The ‘better offer’ is rarely the only factor, because happy employees don’t tend to run around examining and considering other offers at all. That said, even unhappy employees are rarely willing to sacrifice a decent, stable but frustrating job without having another one lined up.

In Summary

If you’re worried about employees moving on at the job posting level, long before you’ve even started to assess a particular candidate, you probably need to turn your focus inward. You’re probably not as great an employer as you think: focus on treating your employees well and making them happy, and employee stability will follow.

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