Quick to quit? An experimental study on employers' perceptions of job-hoppers to explain their hiring chances

Although job-hopping has become more prevalent, its implications for recruitment appear to be less favourable. Drawing on a scenario experiment with professional recruiters, this study examines the threshold at which job-hopping is penalised, the underlying perceptual mechanisms, and the factors that moderate these effects. The results indicate that substantial negative effects emerge from three prior employers within a five-year period and intensify as the number of prior employers increases. Moreover, contrary to expectations of potential benefits, job-hopping elicits exclusively negative perceptions across four theoretically derived clusters: work attitudes (perseverance, responsibility, motivation, and accuracy), career dynamics (loyalty, bore-out risk, and adaptability), human capital (past performance, in-depth experience, and willingness to learn), and social capital (team spirit, interpersonal problems, and communicative skills). Among these, the hiring penalty is most strongly associated with negative perceptions of perseverance, in-depth experience and interpersonal conflicts.