Singapore Invented "Job Hugging." Hong Kong Still Counts Your Résumé Like a Prosecutor.

🇸🇬 Singapore · 🇭🇰 Hong Kong

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Singapore's workforce just quietly reversed a decades-old stereotype. The average annual resignation rate fell to 1.3% in 2024 — the lowest since the Ministry of Manpower started tracking it in 2006 — and average job tenure climbed from 7.3 years in 2014 to a full 8 years in 2024 (Ministry of Manpower data, via NTU Business). Economists now call the phenomenon "job hugging": staying put less out of loyalty than out of fear, with tech layoffs (110,000 globally in 2025 alone, per Layoffs.fyi) doing a lot of the convincing. Hong Kong, meanwhile, never fully let go of its older, more suspicious framework: a Robert Half survey of Hong Kong CFOs found they'd label you a job hopper at exactly five job changes in ten years — and 87% consider Millennial finance staff job hoppers already, versus just 24% for Baby Boomers.

Do's & Don'ts

🇸🇬 Singapore

🇭🇰 Hong Kong

Singapore

The numbers tell a genuinely new story. Beyond the headline resignation-rate drop, the breakdown by occupation shows it isn't universal: professionals, managers, executives and technicians (PMETs) resigned at just 0.9% in 2024, while clerical, sales and service workers resigned at a notably higher 2% (Ministry of Manpower, via NTU Business). The "job hugging" framing — coined and popularized through 2025 — captures something real: people aren't staying because they love their employer, they're staying because the market got scarier, especially in tech, where tens of thousands of layoffs globally have made "stability" the actual perk employers can offer.

That said, the old appetite for moving hasn't vanished, it's just become more calculated. A government careers portal (MyCareersFuture) frames the staying-versus-switching decision explicitly as a strategic choice rather than a loyalty test, and the "mover's premium" — real, documented pay growth tied to switching employers — still exists for people with in-demand skills (HCAMag reporting on Singapore salary dissatisfaction trends). The shift isn't "Singaporeans became loyal." It's "Singaporeans became more careful about when disloyalty pays off."

Hong Kong

Hong Kong's hiring culture still runs on an explicit, almost actuarial definition of job-hopping: Robert Half's CFO survey puts the line at five job changes in a ten-year span, and the generational gap in how that line gets applied is stark — 87% of surveyed CFOs view Millennial finance workers as job hoppers, compared with 36% for Generation X and just 24% for Baby Boomers, even when the underlying career-change frequency might be similar. The perceived upside of hopping (faster salary progression, cited by 47% of CFOs, and broader skills, cited by 35%) is real and acknowledged — but so is the perceived cost: missed promotions (45%), weaker job security (39%), and the sense of never quite being "part of a team" (24%).

What's changed more recently, per recruiters quoted in the trade press, is how juniors themselves relate to the stigma: one Hong Kong headhunter described a candidate who'd "moved to four crypto firms in three years" and noted plainly, "as long as firms keep hiring them, and there's a talent shortage, there's no reason for people not to do this" (eFinancialCareers). The stigma hasn't disappeared from the employer side — 60% of CFOs say they'd still hire a job-hopper, which also means 40% wouldn't — but the junior workforce increasingly treats it as a calculated bet rather than a reputational risk.

The Reckoning

The real contrast is who's doing the calculating. In Singapore, the macro data shows employees themselves recalculating toward staying — tenure is rising, resignations are falling, and the shift is driven by workers responding rationally to a scarier job market, not by employers imposing loyalty. In Hong Kong, the calculation runs the other direction: employers maintain an explicit scoring system for how much mobility is acceptable, applied unevenly by generation, while younger employees increasingly route around that judgment on the bet that talent shortages will protect them anyway.

Put simply: Singapore's current loyalty is defensive and quiet; Hong Kong's current mobility is offensive and calculated, against a hiring culture that hasn't fully caught up to it. Neither city has become more "loyal" or "disloyal" in spirit — both have just gotten more explicit about doing the math.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Reddit (r/askSingapore) — One poster who'd moved from a stable public-sector role into a new agency after seven years asked whether it was acceptable to leave again after just six months, citing a hybrid-work policy that turned out to mean near-daily office attendance and a workplace they found disorganized. Commenters were unanimous in one direction: "if you're not happy, leave" — with one replying that they'd left a previous job after four and a half months over culture, took a pay cut, and were simply happier for it.

eFinancialCareers (first-person account, pseudonym "Hank Li," Singapore) — A self-described serial mover who has worked at four different banks in Singapore described his method plainly: spend the first month of any new role having daily coffee chats with colleagues to map out real problems, then ask his manager directly what measurable targets would earn a promotion — and agree to them on the spot, even forgoing a raise if it meant the promotion came faster.

eFinancialCareers (Hong Kong headhunter, anonymous) — Describing a candidate who had moved to four different crypto firms in three years without apparent penalty, the headhunter's read on the market was blunt: "as long as firms keep hiring them, and there's a talent shortage, there's no reason for people not to do this."

Blind (teamblind.com, general finance/tech thread on 2-year tenures) — Sentiment split sharply by career stage: one hiring manager said "2 years is an eternity these days," implying it reads as a long stay rather than a short one, while another commenter reported a VP calculating their average tenure at 2.5 years mid-interview and remarking that candidates are "starting to notice" the scrutiny — a thread not specific to Singapore or Hong Kong, but directly relevant to how both markets are now litigating the same question.

A note on sourcing: Quora and Internations did not return fetchable first-person threads for this pairing this run; the voices above were sourced from Reddit's r/askSingapore, named eFinancialCareers accounts, and a general Blind thread instead.

Conclusion

If you want a workforce that currently rewards sticking around — not out of old-fashioned loyalty but because the alternative looks riskier right now — Singapore's data backs you up, provided you're not in the specific corners of tech still absorbing layoffs. If you're building a career on calculated moves and you can tell a coherent story about each one, Hong Kong's market will still forgive you, as long as you're young enough that the forgiveness applies evenly. Either way: nobody in either city is being loyal for love. They're both just reading the market and acting accordingly.