Why you don’t need to have the perfect employment history to be the perfect employee.
Earlier this week I read an article in HR Executive Online quoting a study by Evolv, a San Francisco-headquartered provider of data-driven selection tools and services. Their study focused on hourly paid call-centre workers. It revealed there is zero correlation between the number of jobs held and future job tenure.
They go on to say that this might also be true of other hourly paid jobs too
But it got me thinking
Might it not also be true for all jobs?
Do you marry the first person you date? You might, but more than likely you didn’t.
Does that mean you can’t or won’t make a good till-death-do-we-part spouse? No!
Maybe that is comparing eggs to space rockets?
Perhaps a better analogy would be, do you marry the first person you live with?
You might, but you may live with two or three people before marriage?
Does that mean you can’t or won’t make a good till-death-do-we-part spouse?
If dating is like the interview process then living together is definitely working within the job. Just as it is true to say ‘you don’t really know someone until you live together’, it is equally true to say you only really get to know the job (and the company) once you start working there.
For some, those lucky(?) few, you may have struck gold first time out. In fact, you may go to your first interview, be offered your first job and fall in love with your work, all in the same heartbeat.
For most, it takes some trial and error. Some ‘dating’ to find a company worthy of ‘moving in with’
Then the getting to know the real deal starts. The day-to-day reality is realised. Sometimes it is enough; the next lucky(?) group.
But at what point do you ‘marry’ your job? Should you want to get to that stage?
If there is no such thing as a job for life, should you ever be looking for fulfilment from one employer?
Or is being a job hopper the price companies pay for cut-backs, layoffs, downsizing and restructures?
In a disposable economy, where we’ve been trained to discard things in an instant, is your job the real victim?
