A few years ago, Sam Darnold (this year’s Super Bowl-winning quarterback) was labeled a bust.
Drafted third overall in 2018, he cycled through teams, systems, and coaches. A narrative followed him: turnover-prone, inconsistent, not “the guy”. To provide a specific example, after winning 14 games with the Vikings in 2024, Minnesota still thought so little of his long-term prospects that they elected not to re-sign him and let him walk.
Darnold joined the Seahawks for the 2025 season (his fourth team in five years), and he proceeded to win 14 games again. The Seahawks leaned into his strengths instead of asking him to be something he wasn’t. They built a system around him, and suddenly he now looked like “the guy”.
Same arm. Same athleticism. Same person. Different environment.
We see a similar dynamic play out in hiring often.
A resume with four jobs in four years lands in a hiring manager’s inbox and the first thought is often: job hopper. Lack of commitment. Flight risk. Red flag. Sometimes that’s fair. But sometimes it’s just Sam Darnold in the wrong system.
One of us recently reread The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow (yes, reread, if it wasn’t evidently clear by now that we are unabashedly nerds). In the book, Mlodinow makes the case that most of us are astonishingly bad at understanding randomness. We see patterns where none exist. We assign meaning to outcomes that were heavily influenced by context, timing, and noise. There is significant analysis that shows a meaningful portion of CEO “success” and “failure” can be explained by industry cycles, macro conditions, and plain old variability rather than any individual skill (author’s note, better lucky than good?).
The point isn’t that skill doesn’t matter. It’s that context matters more than we’re comfortable admitting. Early career instability doesn’t automatically signal a character flaw. It can signal a mismatch. Poor onboarding. A manager who didn’t coach. An organization that hired for a skill set but didn’t create a pathway for development. Or simply bad timing in a volatile environment.
We’ve watched candidates struggle at one company and thrive at the next. Not because they fundamentally changed, but because someone clarified expectations, invested in training, gave consistent feedback, or created space for them to fail, learn, and build confidence.
We aren’t saying that every bounce is strategic. But the lazy shortcut is assuming all movement is the same.
So, before writing a candidate off, it’s worth asking at least two questions:
- What specifically limited their success in their prior environment(s)?
- Were those limitations structural, seasonal, personal, or stochastic in nature, and are they still present in this opportunity?
In football, we tend to judge quarterbacks quickly. In careers, we do the same. But sometimes “job hopping” is just a player looking for the right playbook with the right team.
Until next time,
Your Spherion South Central WI & Northern IL team