A new book challenges conventional wisdom on job hopping and internal mobility, with lessons for HR on retaining talent
Few pieces of career advice have lasted as long as the idea that the quickest way up is out the door. Change employers, secure a raise, repeat.
Matthew Bidwell, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has spent two decades studying how careers unfold. His new book, The Insider Advantage, draws on that research to make the opposite case, that people are more likely to get ahead by building careers inside organizations.
“In the data I’ve seen, people are advancing more inside organizations than across them,” Bidwell said in an interview with HRD America.
“When you look at moves across companies, people often get pay raises, but they tend to move into jobs at similar levels of responsibility as the one they left,” he said. “It’s moves inside companies that are actually taking people up to the next level.”
The insider advantage
The book’s title refers to what Bidwell calls an insider, someone who has made an investment in the company, knows their way around and understands its culture.
“When you look at people’s careers, often the times they really grew in their careers were the times they stayed a while in the company and climbed the ladder within that company,” Bidwell said.
Familiarity with the organization is a big part of performing well, he said.
“When we look at managerial and professional jobs, you tend to find it takes about two to three years for people to deliver the kind of performance of somebody who knows the organization really well,” Bidwell said. “The first two to three years, you find newcomers have lower performance. It’s after about two to three years that penalty’s gone.”
Bidwell likes to say that people aren’t “plug and play.” The thinking in HR is often that someone with the right skills can be dropped into a role and will be fine, he said, but that’s not really true, particularly for people brought in from outside.
“Even if they have the right skills, until they understand the organization, until they understand the culture, the processes, the people, they tend not to be super effective,” he added.
The trouble with moving for pay
Bidwell said he’d be somewhat wary of changing jobs for pay alone.
“I think the evidence is that pay doesn’t make you as happy as you think it’s going to,” he said.
A big raise can also prove temporary, Bidwell added.
“You can get tempted by a big pay raise, but you have to realize that often that’s the pay raise,” he said. “Nobody wants to continue to give you a pay raise in following years because you’re now being paid above market, and they’re trying to bring you back down.”
Instead, he said he’d look at the long-term payoff, including whether a promotion is likely where a person already works.
“Are you likely to get promoted and move up in your current organization? If you are, I would be tempted to stick around for the promotion. If you’re not, that makes me think more about leaving,” Bidwell said.
Workers’ own views on moving are shifting as well. A MyPerfectResume report from June 2026 covered by HRD America found that employees now treat job changes as a financial risk, with more focus on stability than on mobility.
Additionally, median tenure among U.S. wage and salary workers edged up to 4.1 years in January 2026 from 3.9 years in January 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
How HR can make career paths visible
Despite his findings, Bidwell acknowledged that people often have good reasons to leave, such as hitting a ceiling on growth or becoming disenchanted with the job or colleagues. Workday research from 2025 covered by HRD America found that high performers are increasingly leaving to find growth because traditional promotion pathways at their organizations are disappearing.
Showing employees what staying could lead to is one way HR can help, Bidwell said, and it comes up often in his conversations with HR professionals, particularly in larger and more complex organizations.
“We often don’t have very clear career paths anymore, and so it’s hard for people to know if I stay, what exactly would I end up doing here?” he said. “What’s the next step for me?”
That means making career paths clearer and more visible, Bidwell said, by showing employees the opportunities open to them, what people in their jobs often do next and what it takes to get there, and by helping them navigate those paths.
Workers want that visibility, too, according to a 2026 SHL report covered by HRD America, which found that 84% want employers to proactively show them internal opportunities that match their skills and experience.
Managers also shape whether people stay.
“Obviously, in terms of wanting to stay, managers play an enormous role,” Bidwell said.
“We see things like when managers leave, their subordinates become more likely to quit themselves,” he added.
The cost of starting over
Keeping people also has a financial upside for employers. Gallup’s 2019 estimate puts the cost of replacing an individual employee at anywhere from one-half to two times annual salary.
“Turnover is really expensive,” Bidwell said. “Most sensible estimates of the cost of turnover, at least for managerial and professional employees, are of the order of 100% to 200% of annual salary.”
New hires also take a lot of time to get up to speed, Bidwell said, and on top of recruiting costs, employers are paying salaries while they learn the job and figure out how to navigate the organization.
Bidwell said he hopes the book leaves readers with a more sophisticated approach to thinking about how careers really work, including when to move and what to look for when they do.
Bidwell also wants HR professionals to understand how much performance depends on how well someone knows the organization, and how that changes the way employers think about staffing and how long it takes to build an effective team.
