Employer Loyalty vs. Career Mobility: How to Find the Right Balance

Explore the evolving dynamic between employer loyalty and career mobility in today’s workforce. Jenna Hinrichsen and Amber Schleinkofer share timeless recruiting wisdom and fresh insights on how organizations and employees can thrive – together.

Summary

In this episode of Advancing Talent Acquisition, Jenna Hinrichsen reconnects with longtime recruiting expert Amber Schleinkofer to explore the evolving relationship between employer loyalty and career mobility. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience across industries, Amber shares insights into how technology, shifting values, and greater job mobility have redefined what loyalty looks like in today’s workforce. Together, they examine the trade-offs between long-term tenure and diverse career experiences, the need for intentional talent planning, and how organizations can foster both retention and growth through meaningful development plans.

Episode 8

Jenna Hinrichsen 
Welcome to the Advanced RPO Podcast, Advancing Talent Acquisition. Our guest today is Amber Schleinkofer. Welcome Amber, I’m so excited to have you on. Will you tell us a little bit about your background? 

Amber Schleinkofer 
Absolutely, Jenna, it’s so good to talk with you. I have been recruiting for longer than I’d like to admit, probably a good 25 plus years and have focused in all different industries and levels of search, contingent staffing, direct tire placement, healthcare to manufacturing, construction, nonprofit – just really wide-ranging. Most recently, about a year ago, I decided to go out on my own and started a firm focusing in the manufacturing and construction space nationally. So that’s been a lot of fun. 

Jenna Hinrichsen 
Nice. And just for our audience, Amber and I worked together 25 years ago. Amber actually trained me in recruiting. So I really owe a lot of my expertise to her. But yeah, we definitely date ourselves when we say 25 years… but here we are!

Amber Schleinkofer 
Here we are. Yeah, it doesn’t feel that long for sure. 

Jenna Hinrichsen  
I’m so excited to have you on as a guest. There’s so much that our audience can take from your experience and your insights. So, our topic today is employer loyalty versus career growth. And I want to just explain that a little bit. I think historically, it’s always been a company’s preference if employees have stability and they’ve been with the same company for an extended period of time or it’s looked at as highly sought after if you’ve stated a company for your career. As things have changed and technology has evolved, I think that has also changed. But I don’t know that the mentality of companies when they’re interviewing and hiring have considered that as much. When we look at career growth, it comes down to what’s most beneficial for the employer versus the employee. Is it really truly in everyone’s best interest for someone to stay at a company for an extended period of time or for their whole career? Does it make more sense to move? And so we wanted to take on this topic and Amber and I are going to kind of break this down a little bit today and give you more of our insights and what we think makes the most sense here. We’ll go ahead and start first question just to get baseline. Amber, what is employer loyalty? And what are some of the benefits of that? 

Amber Schleinkofer 
I think employer loyalty, how I would describe it, would be really kind of that long, strong, ongoing relationship where employees choose to stay and grow with a company over the long term. I think some of the benefits at a minimum would be the stability. Stability for both the employer and the employee, right? That lower turnover that you see through that, and often some deep institutional knowledge. I do think employers can create – if they’re purposeful – a workplace culture where people want to stay and where they can evolve. And then that’s where that loyalty can go a little further with stronger engagement, team cohesion, some long-term performance gains and organizational growth. 

Jenna Hinrichsen 
Right. Employer loyalty used to be the gold standard, kind of what I mentioned when we were kicking this off. Just that’s what is viewed most highly on people’s resumes, I would say. You’ve been at the same company for so long. How has that changed in the last 10 years with technology? 

Amber Schleinkofer  
Yeah, well, I mean, technology’s changed how, where, when we work, you know? And so I think that’s certainly been a big, you know, a big component in how we’ve needed to shift kind of thinking about that employer loyalty, what it looked like. Like you said, you know, 10 years ago, prior to now. I think with that too, professionals are starting to seek more personal alignment, because of that, not just with the flexibility – t’s important – but also, I think it’s also led people to looking for more meaningful work and organizations where they maybe have even some shared values. I think it’s really kind of open to that. You know, technology is part of one of those pieces that opened that door, but it’s really led to a lot of change. 

Jenna Hinrichsen  
I think with companies in the past, they tend to get a software or technology that works well for them. And you’ll kind of use the same thing for the course of the time that you’re there. Now, sometimes companies are changing, obviously, and evolving over time. That happens. But when you stay at the same company, I feel like then you’re not getting exposure to different technologies and to different skill sets that companies desire. There’s almost like a misalignment with, yes, we want someone to be stable and be at the same company for a long time, but you know what? They don’t really have the skill set or they haven’t used all these different things. Well, it’s hard to push, put those two things together, right? 

Amber Schleinkofer  
Absolutely. And, you know, there’s the technology, but then it’s also how we approach the work we’re doing from a process flow. There’s so many different philosophies that can be brought in as well. And if you’ve only ever experienced one employer in one way of doing things and you’re not introducing those new ideas and concepts really staying pretty stagnant. And I’m not sure that’s what you want as an individual, nor what you would want for your organization and your organization’s growth either. 

Jenna Hinrichsen 
So it’s kind of like it’s like a catch 22 for employers. They want it, but they don’t want it. They want it in both ways. It’s like you want your cake, you want to eat it too, but you can’t have it that way.
Why should employers embrace the diversity in someone’s background versus viewing it as job hopping? And I know there’s a fine line there – the technology has evolved faster than hiring managers or organizations’ mindsets have. And so how do we get employers or hiring managers to embrace, or why should they embrace that diversity in someone’s background where they maybe have had different jobs every few years? What would be the benefit? 

Amber Schleinkofer 
Before they even get to that point, I would encourage employers, hiring managers, organizations to kind of stop and really think about their strategic plans and goals. A lot of it comes down to kind of looking at the work that needs to be done to support the larger, bigger picture organizational goals and then develop a talent plan that supports that work, that growth. From that, I mean, you really kind of look at it as does that work needing to be done in the time you’re going to need to do it? Is that going to be more impactful? You as an organization can really be creating a meaningful chapter in someone’s career or you can be writing the whole book. You look at loyalty, it’s that writing the whole book, right? But I think what organizations, if they would just kind of reverse engineer it a bit, they would probably find that they and should likely be offering a little bit of both depending on the place in the organization and what the organization’s needing at that, so I think employers do want loyalty and longevity, but to do that, you also need to put a little bit more skin in the game too and think about, as you mentioned earlier, being more intentional about how you’re going to engage that workforce to give them the skills they need externally to bring, circle that back, funnel that back into your organization so that everybody’s winning, everybody’s growing. 

Jenna Hinrichsen 
I also think that it used to be the case that it employers sort of held the weight in terms of hierarchy in the employer employee relationship. And I think that has changed. And you mentioned something about this a little bit ago, but that has changed over the course of time. And I think technology has played a big part in that. We have remote work now. Job seekers and candidates have access to view far more content and job openings than they ever did in the past. Back in our old days, it used to be, you work in the city that you live in. And so there were certain companies that you wanted to work for that were desirable. And if you had the opportunity to work there, the employer was sort of choosing who they would have working there. But now, where candidates have almost equal opportunity, the employers really have to start being more flexible in some of these areas. And I think that’s another place where technology and time has evolved faster than the mindset of the employer. Would you agree with that? 

Amber Schleinkofer 
Yeah, absolutely. For many roles within their organization, because of technology, like you mentioned, the availability of remote work, their pool is larger, but it’s also a larger pool of opportunities for workers. And because of that, it’s kind of shifted that focus from quote unquote loyalty to workers looking at it as their personal alignment. 

Jenna Hinrichsen 
It’s become more of a partnership. It’s not so much, it’s your boss, people work to pay bills and such, but it has become more of a partnership because there more options. I think it needs to be viewed that way from the time that you post a job or start thinking about a job. needs to be viewed as that we’re bringing in someone to help grow the business. It’s a partnership, not a, “I’m going to manage this person. I’m going to be in charge,” so on and so forth. And I think that will help set the tone for the future of that.
How do you think we would strike a good balance between employer loyalty for changing employers? Because we know that there’s obviously benefits to staying in jobs. We’re not saying in this podcast, “hey, you should all of a sudden start considering people who change jobs every two months.” Let’s find something in the middle. How do we find a good balance of that where someone, we can see that someone’s been somewhere long enough to prove themselves and they’ve gained experience in different ways that then becomes an asset to the organization and doesn’t necessarily hold an employee back from growing? and this is a tough question, but what would be a good balance? How do we strike a balance there? 

Amber Schleinkofer  
Yeah, I do think the unique perspective we have as recruiters is we see companies doing things really well in certain areas and some not always as It’s great when we have a relationship where we can kind of share what we’re seeing and help our other clients, you know, maybe consider grow implement. But I love seeing companies where development plans are standard practice. sometimes we think of development plans as a reaction to something that’s happened. I have some organizations I work with where you began with a development plan almost from day one. And it really can start too with some more forward thinking conversations before the hire about what that work is going to look like. I love it when clients are setting up those development plans around what that employee, not only the competency boxes they check that, align with the work you need done, but talking with them about their future, their plans, aligning that to spending time looking at your organization’s future and plans. And how do you get those two lines to, to continue to go together and grow together – being honest about areas where, know, maybe as a job seeker, I know what my path is or I believe I know what my desired path is, but I also know areas where I need to develop and I can share that upfront. And in talking with organizations who, again, they can see you have most of the competencies, but you want to grow in these couple of areas and they can offer that. That’s a great alignment, a great balance. And that’s where you can have that long-term loyalty because that new employee now has areas where they can contribute, but they can also grow with you. 

Jenna Hinrichsen 
Yes, and I think that’s so important because a lot of times leaders will think, and they are, right? They can be a good leader, but you sometimes unintentionally hold people back for your own benefit. You know, this person’s so good in this role, I have to have them in this role. And if you’re not looking at it, as you’ve said, in aligning that with their career goals too, you’re really doing a disservice, not just to the company, because you’re holding someone back that could become bigger, better, stronger in certain areas, you’re holding the person back in their career too. So sometimes it’s having difficult conversations, I feel like, where you have to look at, is this for my benefit or is this for the employee’s benefit? And that’s another thing that I think it’s very easy to just sort of not play dumb, but err on the side of this works well for me. And if they’re not saying anything about it, I’m not going to say anything about it either. Have you seen that come up with companies?

Amber Schleinkofer  
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s when people that that’s when people start talking to me, right, and ask me to start keeping an eye out. And that’s not what most employers want. I really think again, it kind of goes back to that beginning of that relationship. If you start out with a very open conversation, both sides can feel safe about what they’re bringing and what they need, you’re going to have that good balance between loyalty and growth. And those conversations, they can happen regularly and be natural. 

Jenna Hinrichsen  
Yeah. I love that. I always end each podcast with the same question for each guest. I think it’s so interesting to look at different people’s perspectives. And I hope that our audience is taking some good things out of this because every answer is so different. But my last question for you is, what is your top career tip? If you had one thing to share with people for their career that you’ve learned and that’s helped you progress in your career, what would it be? There’s probably a million.  

Amber Schleinkofer 
There are a million. You know, I think one of the things that when I’m talking with those who are considering a new opportunity, they often have the most difficulty answering, but tends to be one of the more impactful conversations we end up having is that I really like for people to take time and reflect on where, again, there’s going to be pivots along the way, but think about where you truly want to end your career and take steps to own your story. You need to track your wins. You need to look at the skills you’re building. You need to look at the impact you’re making. You need to be intentional with all of that. You need to journal, track those things so that you can look back on them, and then be really intentional about surrounding yourself with people who are going to open doors for you, who are going to challenge you. So I really like people to reverse engineer their career a bit, based on kind of where they believe today they want to hang their hat at the end. And when you start looking that far in advance, that path becomes a lot more clear. The areas where you need to kind of bulk up a bit become pretty evident. And you can really start to put that path together. I guess it’s a little straighter path, I guess, if I had to describe it. 

Jenna Hinrichsen  
That makes a lot of sense. I think there’s one thing that I want to share that you shared with me and you didn’t know that I was going to talk about this, but you shared something with me early on and I always laugh about this, but it’s so true. And it’s one of the things that I remember most in my career. And it’s something that I’ve passed down to other people too. It’s advice you gave me and we were kind of joking around when I was working for you when I first started back in the day. And I think I felt overwhelmed with the amount of work I had. And so I was trying to explain to you that something that came to my plate, Like I didn’t have time to do this. Like it was too much. And you listened to me. You were very supportive. And then you let me vent and say what I needed to say. Then at the end of the conversation, you said, “Now, if you would have taken that time to just do the task, you’d already be done with it.” So you spend this time talking about it, complaining or thinking about all the things that you couldn’t do or why you couldn’t do it. If you would have used that time to do it or to do another task, you would have been able to do it. And I was like, “Wow, I’ve never heard that before.” And I always, always, always think of that. And I cannot tell you how many times I’ve used that with employees that I’ve developed or worked with over the years. And it’s always the same reaction, like, huh, I never thought about it that way. 

Amber Schleinkofer 
I think it’s my mindset of, the things you are avoiding, you got to knock those out first. That’s funny that you say that because one, I don’t recall that conversation. However, as a parent, I assure you I’ve had that conversation recently with probably all three of my girls. 

Jenna Hinrichsen  
It sticks clear in my mind! 

Amber Schleinkofer 
It must be how I’m wired, although it sounds a little harsh. 

Jenna Hinrichsen 
No, wasn’t harsh. You’re always so good about how you deliver feedback, but you let me go through it. And I think that was almost like an exercise on your part to let me go through the venting process, which is important, right? Like if someone is really overwhelmed, you need to listen and understand what the issue is here. But it was almost from my perspective in hindsight, it was an exercise for me to go through all the things that I was saying and for you to show me like how much time passed or how much thought or effort or emotion I put into it. And then to say, now, if you just would have done that or this task, you’d already be done with it. We wouldn’t even have to have the conversation. So it made so much sense. And if it wasn’t intentional, I mean, it’s something that has just really stood out in my career. So very appreciative of that. And you obviously are using it with other people and you just don’t even know.  
Well, this was great, Amber. I love this conversation. I love reconnecting with you. Thank you so much for joining today. for our listeners, please subscribe to the podcast. And if there’s a topic that you’re interested in that we haven’t covered, please mention it in the comments and we’ll pick that up in a future podcast. And that’s it for today. So thank you again, Amber, for joining us. 

Amber Schleinkofer  
Thank you so much and it was so great to reconnect. 

Jenna Hinrichsen 
See you all next time.    

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