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Gen Z, job hopping, career gaps and culture fit: what the evidence supports

Four common hiring assumptions, checked against the research. Generational labels don't describe individuals, gaps and short tenures are questions rather than verdicts, and culture fit easily becomes hiring people like yourself. What to do instead.

Jennifer at SortTheStack

  • hiring decisions
  • hiring research

Hiring advice is full of shortcuts about groups of people: Gen Z won’t stay, job hoppers are a risk, a gap means something went wrong, and you should hire for culture fit. Each one replaces evidence about the person in front of you with an assumption about people like them. The research on generations doesn’t support using them to judge individuals, gaps and short tenures have many ordinary explanations, and “fit” tends to drift into similarity. Ask about the person instead.

“Gen Z wants different things”

In 2020 a committee of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reviewed the research on generational differences at work. Its conclusion was blunt: categorising workers with labels like “baby boomer” or “millennial” to define their needs and behaviours “is not supported by research, and cannot adequately inform workforce management decisions”.

The committee’s reasons are worth knowing, because they apply to every new generational headline:

  • Most studies can’t separate generation from age. A survey taken at one point in time compares 24-year-olds with 50-year-olds. Differences between them may be about being 24, not about being born in 2002.
  • Differences within a generation are as large as between them. The committee found that rigorous studies show people from the same generation are just as likely to differ from each other as from people born in other generations.
  • Conditions change for everyone. Some differences attributed to younger workers are better explained by current work conditions, which affect every age group.

It recommended that employers focus on individuals’ work needs instead, and noted that generational labels can lead to prejudice and stereotyping.

For hiring, this means: a generational label tells you nothing you can screen on. If you’re worried a hire won’t stay, the question is about this job (is the pay competitive, is there a path forward, is the schedule workable?) and this person (what are they looking for next?). Ask them. In many jurisdictions, treating applicants differently because of their age is also unlawful.

“Job hoppers are a risk”

A string of short jobs can mean many things: contract or seasonal work, layoffs, a partner’s relocation, a startup that closed, an early career spent finding the right field, or a pattern of leaving when things get hard. Only the last is a concern, and the resume can’t tell you which it is.

What we’d recommend instead:

  • Check whether the job titles say “contract”, “temporary” or “seasonal”. Short tenures in jobs designed to be short aren’t job hopping.
  • Ask one neutral question at the phone screen: “Talk me through the move from X to Y.” People give the reason readily, and it’s usually ordinary.
  • Ask about what they want next. If the answer matches what your job actually offers, short past tenures matter less. If it doesn’t, that’s the real retention risk, regardless of their history.

Don’t let tenure stand in for a requirement. If staying a long time genuinely matters for the role, say so plainly in the posting and discuss it openly.

“A gap means something went wrong”

Gaps get filtered out more than most employers realise. In the Harvard Business School and Accenture Hidden Workers study (2021), almost half of the companies surveyed screened out resumes with a gap of more than six months in work history, regardless of the applicant’s other qualifications. The report lists some of what those filters can’t see: a difficult pregnancy, caring for an ill family member, a health need, or relocation for a military spouse’s posting.

People without software do it too. In a field experiment, Kroft, Lange and Notowidigdo (2013) sent fictitious resumes to real job postings in 100 U.S. cities and found that the chance of a callback fell significantly the longer the applicant had been unemployed, with most of the drop in the first eight months. Their analysis suggests employers read a long spell out of work as a sign of lower productivity, a sign the authors found employers relied on less when jobs were scarce. In other words, it’s an inference about the person, made without asking them.

What we’d recommend instead: treat a gap as unclear, not as a no. Never reject on a gap alone, and don’t set software to do it. If the gap matters to the job (for example, a licence that lapses without practice), screen on the licence, not the gap. And note what someone did during it: courses, caring, volunteering and freelance work often show exactly the evidence you’re looking for.

“Hire for culture fit”

Culture fit sounds like common sense. In practice it’s hard to define, and an undefined criterion fills itself with personal preference.

Sociologist Lauren Rivera (2012) studied hiring at elite U.S. investment banks, law firms and consulting firms, through 120 interviews with the people doing the hiring and observation of a hiring committee. She found employers sought candidates who were “not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles”, and that concerns about shared culture “often outweighed concerns about absolute productivity”.

That’s one study of one kind of employer, and fit may matter differently in a ten-person business. But the mechanism is general: if you don’t say what fit means, it ends up meaning “reminds me of us”.

What we’d recommend instead: write down the specific behaviours your team genuinely needs, as evidence, and assess them like any other requirement. Some examples:

Instead of “culture fit” Write the requirement as
“Fits our fast-paced culture” Has handled several deadlines at once; can describe how they prioritised
“Team player” Has given or received critical feedback on their work and acted on it
“Shares our values” Has raised a problem with a manager or client when it was uncomfortable
“Would fit in with the team” (Remove. If you can’t say what it means, you can’t assess it fairly.)

Then ask about them in a structured interview, with the same questions for everyone. Some teams call this “culture add”: looking for what someone would bring rather than how closely they match. The label matters less than the discipline of writing down what you’re looking for before you meet anyone.

The common thread

Each of these shortcuts is quick to apply and hard to justify. They make candidates easier to evaluate, not better evaluated. The alternative is the same each time: decide what the job needs, look for evidence of it, and ask the applicant about anything that’s unclear rather than filling the gap with an assumption.

Where SortTheStack fits

SortTheStack reads applications against the requirements you set. It doesn’t screen on age, generation, gaps or tenure, and a requirement it can’t find evidence for is marked unclear rather than failed. It does flag possible inconsistencies in a work history, such as overlapping full-time jobs, for you to ask about, not to reject on. See how the screening works.

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