The title should be enough to vote, but for extra detail here’s a hypothetical:
You’re a hiring manager, and by chance you have exactly two applicants for the position. The two applicants are pretty much even in terms of qualifications, enough so that you’d be comfortable that either of them could do the job.
The biggest difference between the two is that one is currently employed and living several states away but wants to relocate, and the other lives in town but is recently unemployed, having voluntarily quit their last job for one reason or another.
Who would you prefer to hire?
Personally, thinking as a hiring manager, I have a tough time with this. On the one hand you’ve got someone in town who can start right away versus someone who’d need a lot of time to wrap things up at their current job and then to relocate. On the other hand, the local took a risk by quitting their job before they had a new one lined up, which suggests leaping before looking, while the currently employed applicant is trying to play it safe and tie up all loose ends in the transition.
Bonus: If the location is so much more important than what the actions suggest about the personality type, how much more qualified would the out-of-stater have to be before they’d be considered?
I said local, because you can more easily do follow up interviews. But realistically I couldn’t imagine two people being so closely tied that location would be a major consideration.
Realistically, sure. Mainly I’m just pondering whether it’s harder to relocate by finding a job first and counting on your current position as a safety net or by moving first and hoping to get a job quickly before your savings run out.
All other things being equal, I’d hire the outsider. Wanting to relocate to the area (along with all the financial hardships that entails) indicates a strong desire to stay at my location for a long time, the local has no such ties.
It’s just easier to hire the local guy. He’s already there and ready to start and won’t be asking for any relocation costs to be considered. Being unemployed is no consideration since it wasn’t worth mentioning the reason for it in the hypothetical. If everything is even then the local guy is a no brainer.
Views on this might differ by location. I don’t see any resistance to outsiders in the Central Florida location. But when I was interviewing for jobs in Upstate New York, some did ask if I thought I could handle New York winters: not much more resistance than in Central Florida, but some.
But in the Southwest, there is definitely a preference for locals. When I was looking for a job all over America, including the Southwest, many ads implied that locals were preferred, and when I actually was setting up an interview, the interviewer was mildly surprised when I asked if it could be a phone interview. Luckily I was heading out there anyway, and so I could interview in person. I wonder if this is because people think they might like the Southwest because of good times on vacation, but when they actually move there they don’t like the relative lack of things to do and moving far away from the people they know.
Now, I still don’t know that it would be easier to find a job in the Southwest by quitting your job, moving there and then looking (although it did work for my brother, whereas many of his jobs in the East were gotten without an in-person interview.) But if you’re already unemployed, moving to the Southwest would help.
I’d choose the unemployed local. If he or she is a good fit, I’ve returned a productive unit to the local economy. If there are problems, I know where to find her or him and get my stuff back.
Go local. Sometimes people move themselves and their families far away to take a job and it doesn’t work out that well. It is easier to let a marginal performer go if they are from the area rather than have to deal with the guilt of letting someone go when they moved across the country and the job is all they have in the area. I have seen the latter scenario play out badly a few times.
No two candidates are ever truly equal however (except maybe for this one set of identical Turkish twins that I once worked with that had identical graduate degrees and lived lived together but I digress).
I’d go with the local assuming they could furnish a good reason for why they left their previous job. If the “boss is an asshole”, I could even buy that as a valid excuse provided that they don’t have a history of leaving other jobs on their resume for the same reason.
While I like the enthusiasm of the guy who is willing to move from out of state, I have less room to negotiate with him on salary since he has a job, and he may want more to compensate for his move. Let’s assume he doesn’t, however, to make it fair. I’d still want to know his motivation for being out here. I know others think him moving means he is committed to the job, but it may be just the opposite. He may need to move out here for a sick parent or other personal reason, and needs ANY job he can find. It might, in fact, be the case that he will look for something he really wants when he has my job lined up and he sees me as simply a placeholder. I’ve certainly seen that happen before in my industry.
I’d rather hire someone currently employed. You didn’t mention how long they were unemploted, but I’d rather have someone with a continuous history. YMMV
That may have a correlation to someone’s fitness as an employee especially if they are let go multiple times but it is far from universal. The old trope that outstanding employees never get fired or laid off is not true especially today. You can be fired for no reason (I have) by someone that has never met you and knows nothing about you personally especially in larger companies. It is just numbers on a spreadsheet to them and whole departments and divisions get the ax sometimes regardless of the quality of the people that are there. People are sometimes forced to quit for reasons that are beyond their control as well. You have to balance good hiring judgement against just plain prejudice because the latter may not be based on anything relevant to a hiring manager.
This would have a lot to do with the position. Working a job for $8-10 an hour? Either one would probably be just fine. Nah, perhaps the outsider would be better, they’d be less likely to abandon the job because they may have no local ties. And it could be interesting and beneficial to have fresh blood in the workplace. A salaried position, managerial, or professional? Probably the local. They’re more likely to blend, you’re offering a high-paying job, and they shouldn’t have a reason to pick up and go back home in the middle of the night, because they are home.
If they really are that equal I’d go with the local for ethical reasons; he’s the one who needs the job more. Although as Yarster says, the reason why they quit would matter.
In Spain the usual attitude is the opposite, but then, usually the outsiders are willing to move/week-commute, not planning to move (if they want to move to the area for personal reasons, they either move first or it’s very clear that they are already in the process of moving - at which point they stop being outsiders); the experience here is that hiring an outsider leads to worse retention. And depending on where you hire from, to worse political troubles.
A lot would have to do with whys of each person’s situation, and with the specific location. I should be able to get good information on the ugly version of why the local left his last job (the grapevine is the healthiest plant in any small town); someone who wants to move away from wherever they are is less attractive than someone who wants to move to wherever our company is.
So all things being equal someone local is much more preferable. That certainly makes sense, though I had wondered if employment was something hiring managers wanted to see. I can see a valid case for both sides.
To take it off the hypothetical track, this is pretty much my current situation. I want to move to a different state, but I currently don’t have the savings to last 6 months on my own while I job hunt. While the economy is picking back up, it seems like a very risky proposition to throw everything to the wind and hope I find something before I go broke. I think for now I still want to try to look for jobs remotely while putting as much into savings as I can, and in the meantime hope I find something for which I’m the perfect applicant.
