Should you quit without a backup?
JULIANA FELICIANO REYES Amelia Longo spent four years helping to build a web design firm with values she believed in.
She launched a fellowship to train under-represented people in tech and developed ways to make the company’s hiring process more inclusive.
For a while, Longo, who had bounced around the arts nonprofit and tech worlds since graduating from college, thought maybe she had finally found her “forever” job.
But then she realized something had changed. No matter how committed she was to the team and the company, she was unhappy working there. She wanted to do something else, something, she’d half-joke, that would more directly help “dismantle the racist capitalist ableist heteropatriarchy.”
So she quit. She gave her boss three months’ notice, is working on finding her replacement, and did it all without a job lined up, without much more than a plan to just, you know, figure it out. And this was the second time in her 10-year career that she had left a job without anything in place.
Declaring this quitting-sans-new-job a bona fide trend is hard to prove — there aren’t the numbers to back that up. but at a time when employee burnout is at a high, more people are freelancing and working in non-traditional work environments, and companies are now built around the idea that everyone is always looking for the next job. It’s become common to see “Looking for my next op- portunity!” on LinkedIn and certain corners of the professional world are changing their perspective on the once-taboo resume gap.
Although there will always be those who make impulse decisions, the people who are quitting without jobs are doing it in calculated, strategic moves due to emotionally and mentally exhausted states that they say prevent them from searching for other jobs.
In a lot of ways, it’s an act of desperation. But it’s also a way to take back control. And it reflects a now widely acceptable belief among young professionals that work shouldn’t kill you, that it must be meaningful and fulfilling.
Abby Mosconi, 34, started suffering from regular panic attacks at her ad agency office and eventually quit. Having been socialized to “get on the conveyor belt” — go to school, get a “real” job, retire — it had taken almost 10 years to realize that wasn’t the right path for her. Quitting, she says, was necessary to figuring out how to build a career that made her happy.
“Umm, can you really do that and not kill your career?” parents ask everywhere. It depends.
Tessa Dill, a recruiter with Uber, says taking time between jobs is so common in the tech world, especially for those working at Silicon Valley companies who often quit once their stock vests, that from a hiring perspective, a resume gap is no big deal. Jeanne Meister, a partner at HR advisory firm Future Workplace, says she’s noticed less of a stigma around being between jobs — as long as you can explain the gap. It’s often a marker of ambition, Meister said.
That ambition — and the impatience to see results — is a quality of the millennial workforce, according to Northeastern University professor Alicia Modestino, who studies the youth labour market.
“Other generations played by the rules,” Modestino said. Not millennials.
“That’s in part shaped by the fact that all those rules went away.”
Ah, the dreaded m-word. It’s a loaded term that many associate with other words like irresponsible and entitled. And that’s exactly how quitting without a job lined up could be perceived by other companies, said Mikal C. Harden, cofounder of Philly recruiting firm Juno Search Partners.
Not to mention, Harden added, that it would put you in a weaker negotiating position when you get that next job.
You also might not survive the break, Meister cautioned. Brand-name companies are stretching out the recruiting process, so “if you’re going to go down this route, you have to be aware that if you want your next dream job, it could easily take six months,” she said. Cultural, economic shift changed how millennials view work and happiness