If you’ve been recruiting long enough, I can almost guarantee you’ve run into a manager that hates job hoppers before. The conversation where you discover the bias usually goes a little like this: You find the perfect candidate. They have everything the manager wants and then some. They’re eager to start. You see that they’ve had a few jobs. It’s really clear that the experience all adds up to make this the perfect candidate. Then, the hiring manager takes one look at the resume and says, “I don’t want to hire a job hopper.”
If you were living in a movie, this is when they’d play some kind of dramatic music. But you’re just sitting at a desk, so all you get is a sinking sensation. You might push back but this bias is often hard to overcome with managers who have been burned by other people quitting roles in the past. Once one great person quits a team, these managers try to protect themselves emotionally. They don’t want to feel that way again and there’s very little we can do to convince them otherwise.
Considering the ups and downs of the last few years, this bias is a little more ridiculous than ever before. At this point, we need to assume job hopping is not always a personal choice. If you’re in a corporate job where you’re trying to feed a family, pay your bills, and get ahead? You don’t quit a job for no reason. If someone ends a job quickly, it’s worth considering that they could either have been working with a toxic team or the business failed. Not the person. But the bias still stands in the way.
Everyone’s Favorite (Biased) Requirements
As a job post writing expert, I can tell you with 100% certainty this is not the only biased data point managers will try to use to screen people in or out that has nothing to do with a candidate’s ability to do a job well. Take years of experience, for example. Government contractors have to use years of experience in job posts even when we know that 1 year of experience is not equivalent in every role at each company. It quantifies time, sure, but it doesn’t qualify people.
Don’t even get me started on college degrees and the paper ceiling. For roles where you learn to do your job at school – think your doctors, lawyers, and accountants? I’d definitely suggest you require a degree. Engineers, too. Especially civil engineers that build roads and bridges. But for a recruiter where there is no class to learn how to do the work? Seems silly to require or value that piece of paper more than experience doing the job.
Over-screening with background checks is another area where we see unnecessary benchmarks for hiring. For example, should we DQ a marketing executive because they had a possession of marijuana charge over 15 years ago? Does that really matter for them to be successful in the work they do today? For years, the answer was often yes, but we can do better today.
Avoid Over-Screening. Remove Bias.
The goal – and mindshift we need to make here – is to focus on screening people in, not out. Run the types of checks you need for compliance or important policy reasons, but avoid over-screening – both running too many kinds of checks, but also considering records that are irrelevant to the role.
To help your team make the most unbiased, efficient decisions, you have to use a background check provider who lets employers customize their background check assessment workflow to clearly tag which aspects of the report should be seen by hiring managers, and what’s not relevant and should not be viewed. The one size fits all approach may introduce unnecessary bias and no one needs to be DQ’d from a job because of irrelevant information.
Background checks aren’t one check fits all. Just like a job post for a recruiter, or marketer, your internal team should have an established policy that tells your hiring team what screenings and verification need to be run for each role. It can’t be up to each manager to just decide what screenings and verifications matter. You need to establish consistency and clarity about what you’re looking for and what your dealbreakers are before anyone speaks to a candidate.
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