Hacker News Reader

Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

A short job or two, fine, but at a certain point it’s a pattern that needs a reason. If the reason is “my spouse was in the military and we moved around a lot for that, but we longer do”, that’s fair enough. If the answer is that you weren’t happy enough at your last jobs to stay for more than 12 months, then why should I think you’ll be any different at your next job?

View on HN

My wife had really bad luck with her first three jobs: the offices would just up and close a year or so after she started (this included a Nokia office because of the Microsoft merger). But she would still have to frame her answer in a way that didn’t give vibes that she was cursed.

No one would blame her for the closing of the whole branch. That's kind of the best possible answer.

I've seen some resumes/linkedins that put reasons for why they left the job in similar situations. Acknowledging stuff like that is a good way to get ahead of questions.

How short? How many examples? And credible reasons, especially if I know something of the circumstances at various large companies.

I know personal counterexamples where someone verged on job-hopping who became a great relatively long-term employee. And I've also known people who had a single example of clear not-meeting-of-the-minds. But, in general, if there's a consistent pattern, no reason to believe you'll be different.

You'll never hear the real reason. So if you have an issue with this fact, don't invite the candidate to an interview. If you don't have an issue with it, then why ask? They'll never say "because I'm constantly looking for better opportunities and will jump ship when I can".

This is what most of those questions on the list have in common: both sides of the table know that the answer will be contrived BS. They are a waste of everyone's time.

Not everyone is a serial liar, don't assume people can't give real reasons for deficiencies in their resume.

Maybe I’m 80% sure I’m gonna pass on this candidate because I’m not confident they’ll stick around, but it can still be worth my time to get on a screener call and at least ask. There can be many reasons why someone jumps around frequently and maybe after hearing their story Ill be convinced that it’s a true story and a reasonable situation for them to be moving so much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com