A Post-Postmodern Employer Concerns: Job Hoppers

Ever since the rise of startup enterprises in Indonesia, there has been a significant changes on job market (Neequaye et al. 2017) this situation has been elevate a long struggle of talent war in Indonesia with a situation where a lot of companies lost a lot of opportunities and resources in order to get and retain their talents (Suseno and Pinnington 2017). Many employers, entrepreneurs, and managers describe the talents in this phenomenon as Job-hoppers. As an entrepreneur myself, I believe that this situation deserves a huge attention from scholars and researchers in various points of view: psychology, industrial engineering, as well as technology.

In this research, I will be taking the point of view from new entrepreneurs, especially of those who run small and medium enterprises. We suffer a lot in the talent war so that we have to do whatever it takes in order to keep running the business. Nawangsari and Sutawidjaya (2019) supported this notion too. And aside from the problem with lack of talented talents, they are also facing a huge turnover. From my business experience in PT BIT, it roughly takes 6 months for new recruits to adapt and be able to fulfill job requirements fully. However, most talents we hire will be gone within 1-2 years. Through an informal conversation, Martin, my partner also cited that being able to get a recruit to stay for more than 18 months is an achievement in itself. PT BIT’s turnover of the year ranges between 10-15%. Not a huge number for technology and startup companies nowadays (Typical Employee Churn, 2019), which most scholars believe that the intentions behind are traceable (Frian and Mulyani 2018) (Ekhsan 2019) and to some extent, I believe should be prevented by employers.

What we learn is that there are certain characteristics we can trace out of employees with a tendency to Job-Hop. To name some of few reasons, we believe that job-hopper case is a complex thing and, strengthened by (Bushardt et al. 2018), we believe that the factors of loyalty does not only works on superficial layer e.g.: Employer Brand, Gross Revenue, Salary and Benefit Package, etc. However, current research has not yet explored many way we can address these Job-Hoppers, be it intrinsic or extrinsic motivations. There are complex factors from searching, recruitment systems, on-boarding, training, leadership grooming, and corporate culture. We see that the way the market works this day is what creates this phenomenon a huge concern to begin with: (a) the ability of companies to sort out job hoppers; (b) understanding the motivation and create an environment to foster employee loyalty, rather than letting them disengaged; and (c) understanding that, to certain extent, existence of job hoppers might be a competitive advantage.

In this article, I am going to suggest various research scholars may be interested in:

• Psychoanalysis of recruits and employees
• Efficacy of tools and techniques to understand job seekers
• Pareto Efficiency: maintaining a balanced number of Job-Hopper in a company where it still be able to fosters sustainable growth as well as rapid innovation
• Training and campaigns corporate can hold to improve employee job satisfaction
• Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation of employees to churn (self-fulfillment, workplace toxicity, workloads, benefit)
• Education Program an education institutions might want to invest in order to develop a loyal job seekers.