Job Turnover Increases in Recovering Market

Patrick McAvoy knew his job had some drawbacks. As a contract employee at the University of Maryland-Baltimore, he lacked benefits and long-term stability, but he stayed on as an events coordinator for three years, hoping to be hired full time and seeing little opportunity elsewhere.

This year, the job market shifted, and by spring, he had two offers.

“It was pretty stunning. You send out resumes so many times and don’t hear anything back. Then you hear back from multiple places, and all of them are good opportunities for your future,” said McAvoy, 28, who turned down an information technology job at the Johns Hopkins University to be an events planner for the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore.

McAvoy’s good fortune illustrates a significant shift in the slowly recovering job market. As hiring picks up across the nation, more people are leaving their jobs voluntarily – a promising sign for workers, companies and the economy.

The “quit rate” – the percentage of American workers who leave jobs voluntarily – has risen to the highest level in four years. That shows that workers are more confident about finding new jobs, said Sophia Koropeckyj, an economist with Moody’s Economy.com.

“When people change jobs, they (usually) change to better jobs and change to higher-paying jobs,” Koropeckyj said. “When people don’t change jobs, they can be dissatisfied, and morale is low. If they’re there because they’re afraid to leave the job, that could have an effect on productivity. The ability to change jobs is a good sign in the economy.”

The number of available jobs, which plummeted to less than 2.2 million in July 2009 during the recession, has averaged nearly 3.8 million since the beginning of 2013, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Despite the nation’s job growth, the economic recovery has been slow – and its prospects remain uncertain. Many job seekers have been forced to accept lower-paying jobs than they held before the recession.

According to Richard P. Clinch, director of economic research for the University of Baltimore’s Jacob France Institute, the economy has been prevented from growing more quickly by the automatic federal spending cuts – known as sequestration – designed to reduce the deficit, as well as the expiration of the payroll tax holiday.

Additionally, the global recession and the slower growth of China’s economy have reduced exports.

Until consumers become more optimistic about the economy’s future, they won’t be spending; businesses, in turn, won’t reinvest profits until customers return, Clinch said. Even as conditions improve, job openings must grow another 10 percent to 20 percent to get back to pre-recession levels, he added.

With the expansion of the job market, more than half of the 153 organizations surveyed by consulting firm OI Partners reported higher turnover, according to research released in May. And that involved all types of jobs, including middle managers and senior-level executives.

Employers are responding – especially to supervisors and those tagged as future leaders – by offering job coaching and increasing pay and benefits, said Patty Prosser, chair of OI Partners. Front-line employees are being given improved training and perks such as tuition reimbursement and flexible hours and schedules.

Some workers have become less willing to wait for raises.

“If you’re told to wait a year, you don’t want to wait a year,” said Emily Testerman, a 2010 graduate of Stevenson (Md.) University who has found opportunities whenever she has looked into changing jobs. “You work hard and want to make more, so you look.”

Testerman, 24, left a job in November to work as a retail marketing manager for  Diamond Comic Distributors in Timonium, Md. It’s the third company she’s worked for since graduating. She landed her first full-time job in fall 2010 as a public relations coordinator for Vitamin, a Canton, Md.-based graphic design and public relations firm, and worked there for a year.

“I ended up leaving because it really, really delved into the PR stuff, and … it wasn’t my thing,” she said. “I was super-grateful for working there, but started looking 10 months in.”

She was hired as an account manager at Adcieo LLC, a Baltimore agency that works with nonprofit groups on email campaigns. After working there for a year, she thought about looking elsewhere once again. But before she could start, she got a call from Diamond, which had interviewed her previously.

Her job with Diamond, for which she writes a column and newsletter aimed at comic shop owners, came with a bigger salary and more opportunity. For the first time, Testerman feels she won’t need to start looking again anytime soon.

Testerman believes she has progressed because she’s realistic and open-minded about her options. As an English major in college, she originally wanted to write for magazines.

“I don’t scour the job sites searching for something that’s exactly what I thought I wanted to do,” she said. “I don’t just search ‘entertainment writer,’ because that’s not going to be there. You have to be flexible and realize you could end up somewhere that you could make work. If you can use the skills you’ve learned or you’re good at, you’ll do OK as long as you can move along there.”