The quiet clues show up in what people stop saying, what they start polishing, and how they reshape their work history into a story that can travel.
Old experience is supposed to stay still. Yet in a small follow-up, people sometimes went back years—adding quantified wins, changing present tense to past tense, or recasting several roles in one consistent editorial voice.
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Choose a factor for the plain-English finding. “Signal” means it carried useful information in this study—not that it proves an individual is leaving.
The most useful clue was subtle: people who later moved were much less likely to define themselves through their current employer in the headline.
Keep in mind: The strongest stable behavior term; effect is concentrated in senior bands.
The clearest explicit signal: someone has publicly raised their hand. It mattered a lot when present, but almost nobody in the sample used it.
Keep in mind: Only 15 flag-bearers; direction is credible, magnitude is not precise.
Past switching behavior was informative. People with a larger share of short completed stints ranked higher in the behavior-only model.
Keep in mind: A career-shape feature, not evidence of current intent by itself.
Phrases like “seeking,” “available,” or “open to opportunities” look useful at first. Most of that information disappears once we know whether the headline still names the current employer.
Keep in mind: Mostly collinear with employer omission in this fit.
A board seat, advisory role, or second ongoing job can look like an exit ramp. In this senior-heavy sample it was actually more common among the controls.
Keep in mind: Population-conditional; in the senior-heavy controls this often meant board or advisory work.
Short current tenure sounds intuitive, but cache timing and seniority composition explain too much of the apparent gap.
Keep in mind: Do not use current tenure as a standalone exit claim; cache age and missingness distort it.
Dropping the employer from the headline was the most stable clue. It can signal that someone is beginning to present an identity that travels beyond the current company.
Open-to-work is clear, but waiting for it means missing almost everyone. Subtler positioning changes were far more common in this sample.
A repeated pattern of short stints carried information. Current tenure, a second role, or generic seeker language did not earn the same standalone claim.