So after resigning from my last job for health reasons, I am feeling much better after some rest and updating my resume to get back in the saddle again. I stayed less than a year in my last job, but I don’t know how long I would have stuck it out there even if not for the health reasons. Let’s just say there was a lot of management dysfunction in addition to some growing pains and leave it at that.
Of course, it’s not professional to rant about your last job in an interview. But would it also be unprofessional to talk about the high turnover by (somewhat coded) way of explaining why I am no longer there? In a group of 20-some people, someone quit every 5 - 6 weeks during my time working there, and all but one quit without another job lined up. Is this maybe a way I could explain why I left, or should I just leave it alone unless asked point-blank? I did resign for health reasons, but I may have tried harder to negotiate some kind of extended leave of absence if I had really loved the job. (I wasn’t there long enough to be eligible for FMLA, and in the end I needed more than 12 weeks off to recover anyway.)
This is new territory for me - I haven’t been in the job market when I didn’t already had a job since I finished grad classes, more than 20 years ago. Impeccable timing, right?
I wouldn’t mention it. Is the type of job that typically has high turnover like a call center?
Quite frankly, I’d blame it on Covid slowdowns. HR people aren’t investigative reporters. Unless you were escorted out of the building in handcuffs and made the 6 pm news, they’re not going to care.
If it was a local company, HR probably already knows that this company was not a good place to work at. Every city has a few of those, and sometimes in the most unexpected places.
Yeah, I got fired by an ISP that was notorious for its turnover rate. I was seriously afraid that this was going to hinder my job search but the only reaction I ever got was “is there anyone they haven’t fired?”
I didn’t get fired, I resigned of my own free will when it became apparent that my health wasn’t going to improve unless I really got some rest. It’s tough to be a paralegal in a high-pressure law firm if staring at a computer monitor for hours on end makes you literally queasy, because basically all work is done on computers. Post-concussion syndrome is no fun. My timing was pretty terrible, though - I resigned in mid-February, when the only known COVID cases in the U.S. were confined to a nursing home on the West Coast, and my last day was in early March. But if I am asked the reason why I left (which every job application in my living memory has asked), I am not going to lie. People in my line of work do check references.
Jobs like that don’t typically have such high turnover. I stayed at my previous job for 12 years, and that wasn’t atypical. (Not all firms have such low turnover, but plenty of people stay at the same firm for a decade or more.) It’s pretty unusual not to stay in a job for at least a couple of years, and if you have a bunch of short stints like that, it can be perceived negatively. It can take quite a while to get new employees up to speed.
But if your previous job was 12 years, that speaks to your commitment. I wouldn’t sweat one blip on your CV - everyone has a bad experience once in their professional lives, we all know there’s shit places to work.
I don’t think you have anything to explain, really. It won’t help you to have more reasons than just “I left for heath reasons, which are now resolved”.
That’s exactly my concern, particularly in a very detail-oriented profession when the health reasons involved cognitive fatigue and problems concentrating. I mean I wouldn’t be considering applying for a job if I still felt like crap, but how do they know that?
OP sounds like she’s concerned that resume readers could look at the short tenure and think, oh, she’s a job-hopper or a malcontent who got fired and just chuck her resume in the trash without asking about it. I’m personally inclined to think it’s unlikely at a place you want to work at, but that’s just me.
Is there any way I could just say “personal reasons” or “an FMLA-type issue before I was eligible for FMLA?” Any way that wouldn’t be incredibly off-putting?
I quit my last job after a year and a quarter. I was a manager, and 13 of the 15 people on my boss’ staff had quite or transferred while I was there - none fired. I was 14.
I never mentioned it.
Leaving after a year is no problem, unless someone has left lots of jobs after a year. That’s a red flag. Once, not so much.
And if anyone asks, just give the numbers about turnover. That is objective, and it shows that the problem is not you.
In forty years of interviews, I did get asked ONCE why I left my previous employer.
And I laughed “It wasn’t just me. Company ran into some problems and downsized a lot of great workers.” Interviewer laughed, too, and said I wasn’t the first to have interviewed. Got the job, by the way…
Many years ago, I had a job experience that was so unpleasant, I briefly considered surrendering my license. I was fired after 4 months, so that problem was solved. Anyway, about 5 years later I was interviewing for another job (that I didn’t get, but I suspect it was because a former employee wanted to come back) and the interviewer asked why I left Hospital XYZ after 4 months. I hemmed and hawed a bit, and he set my resume’ down and said, “You can tell me the truth. I’ve been told many times that Hospital XYZ is a very difficult place to work at.”
So, it wasn’t just me.
In the meantime, I found out that the pharmacist who replaced me, a woman who was the sole support of her two children, one of them disabled, and her husband who became a SAHD to look after the disabled one, got so fed up that she simply walked out in the middle of the day without another job lined up. I also finally met someone who actually knew this pharmacist (long story why that’s relevant) and she told me that she had done some relief work for him when he had his own company, and all 3 paychecks she got from him bounced, and that the REAL reason his business he had before that failed, a small town hole-in-the-wall pharmacy, was because everyone in town knew that he beat his wife up all the time. The overwhelming majority of men - I wouldn’t believe that. Him? Totally.
Yeah, when we were hiring and learned that a competitor was laying people off, we didn’t say “those losers, we don’t want them.” We said instead “aha, a bunch of excellent potential employees.”
Given that a good percentage of hiring managers got laid off at least once in their careers, it is no longer a stigma.
I’m finding myself in a similar situation, though I was let go for not passing probation, rather than quit. I had some health issues and took time off during the height of Covid, so that was the reason given.
I have never been so miserable in a job . It was just such a toxic environment of micro-management and pointless procedure. Staff turnover in that department is so frequent that the longest standing employee has been there only a year.
I had my first job interview recently. I can’t remember what I said regarding my short stay, other than maybe that I wasn’t a good fit for the company. I’m really not sure what to say about it. I must have said something right, I start a new job (just a 3 month temp, but hey, it’s work) next week.
I don’t know about that. I think a lot of that depends on the industry and location and the sort of job you have. I work in tech / consulting and I’ve changed jobs about every 1-4 years. And it’s not like there’s anything inherently “wrong” with me like an attitude problem or constantly screwing up stuff. But what I have consistently seen is that things will be going well for the most part. Maybe even better then “well” in that I’ll get promotions and other positions of responsibility. But then things will slow down. People will start taking longer lunches (not because they are lazy but because their days aren’t busy). Senior management will stop going to happy hours, etc. Managers, salespeople, and other business developers seem stressed out and start exiting along with some of the top talent. In many cases (because I know how to write SQL), I’ll find myself being asked to build management reports (or I might just build them myself because I’m bored) and I can actually see that half the company or practice area is sitting idle 60% of the time.
Then usually what happens is there will be a stream of layoffs or people mysteriously leaving without warning and then one random day I’ll get a call from HR and given a generous exit package.
It does seems to happen repeatedly over the course of my career. Sometimes I’ll stay as long as 4 years, but then it seems to be followed by a string of 9 to 18 month stints.
At first it was actually very intentionally, starting when I graduated college in 1995:
Job 1 - A small civil engineering firm in my home town, which was my original career. I stayed a year before deciding I wanted to get into the same overpaid bullshit technofinancioconsultaccounting jobs all my classmates had in New York and Boston.
Job 2 - I networked my way into a small/medium sized tech consulting firm (more of an IT bodyshop really) in Boston. At the time I enjoyed the frat-house vibe and found I was really good at that sort of work. But the company wasn’t really going anywhere and it was the dot-com boom so after a year I started looking around the time it was acquired by some Indian outsourcing firm.
Job 3 - Landed a job at one of the “Fast Five” ecommerce consulting firms that sprang up in the mid 90s (mostly interchangeable digital agencies like Razorfish, Scient, Viant, Sapient, Cambridge Technology Partners, MarchFirst, etc that eventually all went out of business or became Publicis Sapient). That lasted about a year before trying to work 70 hours a week and go to business school became too problematic. They would lay off 70% of their workforce about a year later.
Job 4 - A business analyst / programmer in the IT department at the headquarters of a clothing company. Much better environment - nice offices, cubes instead of open-plan, better commute, flex-time hours instead of shitty ones. Perfect job for going to school in the evenings. Stayed there about 2 years until I graduated and moved to New York
Job 5 - This was the job I had been working towards - Associate level post-MBA job at a prestigious consulting firm in Manhattan (Big-4 firm that used to rhyme with “Toilet & Douche” until they “dotcomified” the name). And I was super-excited to have that job because a lot of my classmates were having offers rescinded because of the dot-com bubble bursting, etc.
That job started the day before 9/11.
So that’s 5 jobs before I turned 30. Which would have been find had the world not gone to shit in 2001 and I was able to stay in the Big-4 and work my way up to “partner” over the next decade or so.
It’s always kind of my hope the next job will last 5-10 years, but it seems like no matter how well the company is doing when I join, within 1-4 years things go to shit as I described. My last job was going great up until this shit happened.
The thing is, I don’t think that’s too uncommon for New York. I look at all these profiles on LinkedIn and all these people have 1-4 year stints jumping back and forth between the Big-4, Accenture, some startup, Citi, Goldman Sachs, another startup, another consulting firm, Google, law school, business school, some random thing I can’t even tell if it’s an actual “job”.
Which sucks because I hate job hunting and I hate starting new jobs not knowing if it’s going to be a great place to work or a fucking shitshow nightmare I can’t wait to get fired from.
Anyhow, that’s a fairly long answer to a question about “why did you leave your last jobs?” that almost no one seems to ask me on interviews.
