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Being labeled a job hopper once was considered a bad thing. These days, serial job hoppers may catch a perception break.
Job market experts say some employers are less inclined to look unfavorably on frequent job changes. But be forewarned: Lenience is often a generational thing.
I asked two Kansas City human resource consultants, Leigh Branham and Ted Richmond, what they hear about job hoppers from their corporate clients.
Resumes that show frequent job changes — say, four jobs in eight years — still will raise questions, they said. But if applicants are prepared with good justifications for their nomadic job trail, hirers’ doubts may be overcome.
Those justifications shouldn’t include tales of personality troubles with past bosses. They shouldn’t include complaints about overwork or underappreciation.
They also shouldn’t convey the impression of willy-nilly job changes. Job hunters shouldn’t leap blindly from job to job and then find out they made poor choices.
But job changes that occurred because of business or department shutdowns, recruitment to another company, greater responsibility or a chance to gain new, relevant experience are all accepted reasons.
Also important, Richmond said, can be knowing the age range of the person reviewing your resume. Boomers and older workers tend to want to see job tenures of at least three years. A series of shorter tenures is likely to convey “what’s wrong with this worker?” impressions.
But if a younger boomer or Gen X or Y member is reviewing the resume, frequent job changes may not raise eyebrows. They’re more likely to see frequent change as evidence of a job market in which many workers lose jobs through no performance fault of their own.
Out in the real world, though, job hunters aren’t likely to know the age group of people screening their resumes. That’s why, Branham said, it’s best to “network your way past the resume.”
If someone who knows you and the quality of your work will recommend you (or hire you!), your resume becomes a backup and not your primary commercial.
Again, out in the real world, that’s not always possible. In which case, if your job history is pockmarked with really short job tenures (generally less than a year), you might want to omit from your resume any job so short term that you’d have difficulty explaining it.
Resumes that list only years, not months and years, of job tenures may be the best strategy to mask a job hop of less than a year.
You’ll have to measure your own ethics and guess what kind of background checking your target company will do in order to decide whether to use that tactic. There’s no sure way to tell whether it will help or hurt.