Weatbrook 1

I believe writing teachers should write. I share my writing projects with my students to
show them “real world” applications and the processes and problems writers and
researchers encounter

Stacie Weatbrook
English Online Plus
English 1010
March 9, 2016
Working Annotated Bibliography

***Note to students: Your Working Annotated Bibliography requires only 4 sources. I have more
so I can show you the process I actually use as I am researching for writing projects. My
sources are not in alphabetical order here because I wanted to show you the “story” of my
research. I also have not put the sources in perfect MLA format yet, but will for the final
Annotated Bibliography. ​Explanations about my research process are in red.

Research Question: What does length of tenure tell about a job candidate?

Real-world alert! ​I am actually researching this question for one of my clients. She owns a
staffing company that only contracts Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to consult or staff science,
finance, and tech firms. She wants to have a blog post written that will explain to potential
clients how to look at job history and length of time on jobs.

I started with a newspaper source. I found this through a regular Google search, but Proquest is
a good database to find general newspaper information:

Egan, Matt. “Good News: More Workers Are Quitting.” ​CNN.com ​3 April 2015 Online.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/03/news/economy/jobs-wages-salary-quitting/

Matt Egan, CNN reporter writes in the CNN Money section that 2.8 million workers voluntarily
quit their jobs in January 2015, up 17% from January 2014. Egan interviewed two workers for
his article. Ben Baxter has achieved a 31% pay hike since the end of 2011 by changing jobs
every 6 to 12 months. He has quit 6 engineering positions since February 2013. Mark Bivens
has quit 3 jobs since 2013 but is hesitant to keep up the trend because he doesn’t want his
resume “riddled with fleeting jobs.”

This article gives good information to the perspective that workers “job hop” to find the most
lucrative position. Egan points out that a stronger economy helps workers feel more confident
about voluntarily moving jobs and, when the quit rate rises, wages often rise with it. This article
gives a good perspective about what length of tenure at a job can tell an employer (the
perspective of the employee who is looking for money and isn’t incredibly loyal to the company).
I am concerned that the statistics in the article were just thrown in without citing their origin.
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I started my research off with a newspaper search and found this article. It gave me a good
place to start, but I am hesitant to trust it completely because of Egan’s lack of quoting sources.
I tend to trust his interviews because they sound reasonable, and they cite names, but I wonder
where the 2.8 million comes from and the 17% increase. I will keep looking...

Keng, Cameron. “Employees Who Stay In Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50%
Less.” ​Forbes.com​ 22 June 2014
http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employees-that-stay-in-companies-longer
-than-2-years-get-paid-50-less/2/#d40c204f8e31

Keng explains the recession caused typical raises to plummet form 5% of annual salary to
around 1% (if raises were given at all.) Staying with a company can freeze workers potential for
growth in both salary and title, shows Keng. By jumping to a new company, workers can have a
fresh start at a higher salary and are not limited by their previous company’s pay structure. Keng
writes:
But, the important question is whether the risk outweighs the reward. Christine Mueller,
President of TechniSearch Recruiters, has had clients that “will not consider anyone who
has had more than three jobs in the last 10 years, no matter the reason.” Even so,
Mueller still recommends that an employee makes a transition every three to four years
for maximum salary gains. Thus, the question is less about whether employees should
jump ship, but how long they should they wait before jumping to maximize their salaries
and achieve their goals.

Keng uses statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and they are accurately cited (I know
because I went to the BLS site and checked!) He also uses hiring managers as sources as well
as worker who raised her salary from just above $16,000 a year to $72,000 over ten years by
changing jobs.

This article has given me more about both the employer’s perspective and the employee’s
perspective: Employers don’t like to see a lot job jumping on resumes. However, from the
employee’s perspective, it is important to look after your own interests and to change jobs every
few years. Still, explains Keng, money shouldn’t be the only consideration employees should
also consider quality of life and stress levels.

Employers may need to realize the importance of having a career track in order to retain top
talent. I see that a staff development program where employees are promoted from within will
not only save the company money from having to pay more for new recruits, it will also help
keep good employees when substantial raises are offered.

This article seems more reputable than the ​CNN ​article from Matt Egan because the sources
are not only credible, the are actually cited. Also, ​Forbes ​is a more respected business source
than ​CNN, ​which is a general news source.
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* * * * *
I decided to try searching the databases because I wanted more specific, researched studies
and information. I found an article on choosing to hire more employees for your massage
business. Not exactly what I was looking for, but the article recommended a book. I went to the
county library to check it out….

Smart, Geoff, and Randy Street. ​Who: The A Method for Hiring. ​2008: New York, Ballentine.

Smart’s company, ghSMART, is focused on helping businesses make better ​who ​decisions.
Street is a partner in the firm and leads the Executive Learning unit of the company. In
preparation for this book, Smart and Street spent over 1300 hours of interviews of CEOs and
managers. This book is report on their findings of how to improve the interview process in order
to find the best talent for the job. Who mistakes can be costly, says Smart and Street.
They explain, “According to studies we’ve done with our clients, the average hiring mistake
costs fifteen times an employee’s base salary in hard costs and productivity loss” (xvii)

Smart and Street (Street-Smart ;) write their book to business owners, hiring managers, and
CEOs. They explain the importance of avoiding “voodoo interview questions” and give five tips
for managers to use when hiring.

This source will be useful because it is a book that looks at the big picture of hiring practices.
Books aren’t able to give up-to-the-minute statistics and information, but they do represent a
larger body of information than articles can offer.

* * * * *

I continued searching the databases. I have learned that the issue I am researching is called
“job hopping” and it is actually a subject keyword. ​Subject Keywords​ are the way articles are
sorted within a database. If you don’t type in the right keyword, you risk missing out of the bulk
of information in the databases. When you pull up an article from a database search, it will list
Subject Headings ​which give the keywords. By typing in ​job hopping ​to my search, I was able
to narrow the search and find some helpful articles. I also narrowed my search down by ​date
and by ​full text​ because I am only interested in recent information that I can access online. The
search gave me 7 articles. One was extremely interesting:

Derville Gallicano, Tiffany. "Stop The Job-Hopping." ​Public Relations Tactics​ 22.4 (2015): 15.
Business Source Premier​. Web. 7 Mar. 2016.

Tiffany Derville Gallicano, Ph.D. explains the importance of retaining millennials and offers 6
strategies based on her research: Groom for long-term success, ensure they are constantly
learning, communicate your commitment to their long-term growth, cultivate personal
relationships, accommodate their interests if feasible, and create a strong work environment.
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The necessity of keeping millennials and their tendency to job-hop are underlying concepts of
this one-page article. I see another perspective to the question of what tenure says about
candidates: Sometimes, job-hopping shows ambition. Yes, it’s personal ambition, but this
ambition could be cultivated to helping the company. It becomes the employer’s challenge, then,
to develop creative ways (in addition to money) to help millennials stay aboard rather than jump
ship.

This article is very credible to me. Gallicano is an expert on studying relationship management.
She explained her study methods and how she and her colleagues found the information in
order to make recommendations.

In this article, Gallicano mentions that the original information was published in ​Public Relations
Review​. I did a search by author (​AU​) and source (​SO​), typing in ​Public Relations Review. ​I had
to change my search criteria by deselecting ​full text.​ I found Gallicano’s original article…..

Gallicano, Tiffany Derville. "Relationship Management With The Millennial Generation Of Public
Relations Agency Employees." ​Public Relations Review​ 39.3 (2013): 222-225. ​Business Source
Premier​. Web. 7 Mar. 2016.

This is the original study Gallicano published. It was not a full-text article in the databases so I
couldn’t read it. Right now I don’t think it is essential to my research question, but I am listing it
just in case. If I feel like my research is taking me in a direction of looking into retention rather
than what length of time on a job says, I will talk to the librarians about helping me find this
article since it isn’t full-text.

I decided to go back to Google and see what a search for “job hopping” would produce. I got
this article:

Weedmark, David. “Job Tenure and the Myth of Job Hopping.” ​About.com ​nd

http://jobsearchtech.about.com/od/changingcareers/a/Job-Tenure-And-The-Myth-Of-Job-Hoppin
g.htm

In this undated article, tech writer for ​About.com​ David Weedmark compares the most recent
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) regarding employee tenure. Weedmark shows that the idea
many employers have that millennials tend to job hop more than previous generations is false.
He explains the BLS report comes out every two years and shows the median employment
tenure is currently 4.6 years and has risen over the past several years.

year median tenure in years tech careers in years

2002 3.7 3.2 (after the dotcom crash)
2004 4.0 4.8
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2006 4.0 4.8

2008 4.1 4.5
2010 4.4 4.8
2012 4.6 4.8

It’s true that as employees get older, they tend to have longer tenure but that isn’t actually a
function of being a millennial,Weedmark explains. “Going back to January 1983, the median
tenure for [each] age group was close to what it is today, with only a couple months difference
for most age groups. Only in those aged 45 and older does the difference become more
pronounced today than what it was 30 years ago, with the median tenure being about three
years less than it was then.” Weedmark is pointing out that older workers of today actually have
shorter tenure than the older workers of 30 years ago. He also notes that younger workers will
naturally have shorter tenure because of their age at the time the surveys are taken.
This article uses BLS statistics to show that job hopping isn’t actually increasing, it is
decreasing. The most recent statistics it quotes, however are 2012 and there is no date on the
article. It is an interesting concept, but I am going to the original BLS site for stats...

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf

Ok. Here’s the latest press release on employee tenure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics from
2014:

The median years wage and salary workers have been with their current employer was 4.6
years in 2014, unchanged from 2012. Median tenure of older workers (ages 55 to 64) is 10.4
years. Tenure of workers 25 to 34 is 3.0 years.

Federal, State, and Local government employees have longer tenure than private sector
employees with 8.5, 7.4, and 7.9 years, respectively.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/history/tenure_09192002.txt

I looked up the 2002 numbers just to double-check Weedmark’s reporting, (which was
accurate). The BLS report states that average tenure in 2002 was 3.7 years and that “tenure
has ranged from 3.4 to 3.8 years in the years when such information was obtained.” This report
states that median years of tenure increase with age and that older workers had 3 ½ times the
tenure of workers ages 25 to 34 and that 30% of workers over 25 had been with their current
employers for 10 years or more.

So actually, these statistics show that job-hopping was more common 14 years ago than it is
today, and that younger workers back then were more apt to change than they are now.

What does this mean to my research question? It means that length of tenure on a job will likely
indicate the age of the applicant. (Though doing some quick addition of year of graduation and
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time on jobs will also do that.)

It also means that employers might not need to be too concerned about short job stints. Those
short employment periods attributed to millennials are actually increasing and hopping from one
job to the next is more likely a factor of finding the right salary and the right company.

I think BLS statistics are about the most reliable I can get: They are based on the CPS (Current
Population Survey) and are subject to sampling errors, but that is to be expected.

At this point in my research, I have formed a few perspectives about how to look at length of
tenure:

1) Some employers see shorter tenure and several jobs within a 10-year time span as
negative. They attribute job hopping as a trait exclusive to the new millennials in the
workforce and have a rather negative impression of millennials but know their skills are
valuable. They see job hopping as a sign of a disloyal employee.

2) Employees see job hopping as a way to break out of the pre-set pay and promotion
structure of their current company. It is important to note that workers who take the
initiative to find positions with better pay and more chance for promotion may actually
make better employees.

3) Smart employers will realize that while employees do jump ship in search of higher pay,
this trait may actually be a sign of a top employee because they show ambition. They
also realize that length of tenure for younger employees isn’t a new trend. Because the
cost of replacing an employee is typically very high, companies should strive to hire top
employees and keep them. There are ways to help such employees stay with the
company and smart employers will have a strategy for employee retention.