Mercor CEO says young people job-hop too often

Mercor’s CEO thinks Gen Z should stop hopscotching the job market.

Brendan Foody, the 23-year-old CEO of the AI training giant, wrote on X about a takeaway that surprised him from interviewing candidates. The average tenure among the younger job candidates is shorter than he expected, he wrote.

“Too many people in my generation underestimate how much relationships, reputation, equity, and trust compound over time,” Foody said in the Monday post.

Instead of valuing long relationships at work, Foody said that these young people “jump to the hottest company every year because they think it looks good on a résumé.”

“Look at almost anyone who’s built something extraordinary: they weren’t serial job hoppers,” Foody wrote.

In an email to Business Insider, Foody wrote that workers should change jobs for the “right reasons,” like if they’ve stopped learning.

“Moving because the work is better is very different from moving because a logo looks good on a résumé,” he said.

Andreessen Horowitz partner Josh Elman replied to Foody’s post on X, suggesting that there may be good reason to change companies.

“You are right that going from job to job without meaningful contributions nor closure is a bad pattern,” Elman wrote. “But it is worth going deeper with people who continue to work on important things at important times. That perspective compounds.”

Does Gen Z love to job-hop? A few years ago, the data suggested as much. A 2021 analysis by careers site CareerBuilder found that Gen Z workers spent an average of 2 years and 3 months in a role — 6 months less than their millennial counterparts. A 2023 study from the management consulting firm Oliver Wyman found that 70% of Gen Zers in the US and UK who said they were “loyal” to their employers were seeking a new job.

Job-hopping may have its benefits. Changing companies has often been associated with increases in compensation.

In his email, Foody acknowledged this potential outcome: “Switching jobs can often be the fastest way to get a raise or a title bump in the near term, so the incentive feels real.”

Despite Foody’s view, many workers are now “job-hugging,” or choosing to remain in their current role, clinging to stability amid challenging hiring environment. (While we’re talking about buzzwords: if you’re job-hugging, beware “quiet cracking.”)

Foody is based in San Francisco, a city with hotly rising AI companies that workers may be eager to break into (lest they remain stuck in the “permanent underclass”).

In his email, the Mercor CEO wrote that compensation was climbing fast in the city, adding to the incentive to hop.

“In tech, and especially in AI right now, the pull is strong,” he wrote. “SF concentrates all of that. Everyone knows who just raised, who’s hiring, and what the offers look like, so the grass always looks greener.”

Gen Z isn’t the first generation to get a job-hopping reputation. Before them, millennials were the so-called job-hopping generation.

But according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, neither generation was the most likely to change jobs when they were age 20.

That title goes to the baby boomers.