If I’m interviewing a candidate who is currently employed, I already know there’s a reason they’re looking for a new job. You don’t really need to explain to me what’s so bad at your job. I would prefer it if you were to tell me why you’re running to my place of employment rather than spend a lot of time detailing what you’re running away from. So I’d focus more on what you’re looking for and leave the specifics of your current job out.
No, that doesn’t work for me. If someone moved across the country and is already looking for a new job seven months later, while saying everything is hunky-dory there, I’m going to think it’s their initiative, not hers.
It’s perfectly plausible to say the job you’re in isn’t the same job you moved for, and even say something about there being a lot of management turnover, and that you’re just exploring options. Otherwise I’m going to assume that you didn’t pan out for them given the short time frame.
Regardless of who initiated it, clearly the job ended up not being a great fit if someone moved across the country and is looking for a new job seven months later. So pretending that everything is hunky dory is a bit disingenuous and raises some red flags for me.
That works if you’ve been at a company five years. Not seven months. It makes the OP sound like a job hopper which the OP isn’t.
I was in the RV/Automotive industry for years and I worked at a couple of “bad” dealerships. These dealerships had such a bad reputation after a bit that more than one interview I had would result in some fun smack talking during the interview. It would always start with the interviewer asking me something like “So, is it as bad as I’ve heard over there?” or something like that.
I know this is not usual, but in a small industry, word does get around. Just wanted to share how things can sometimes go. I never had to say much of anything about why I left, more like how’d I last as long as I did.
Right. Talk up the potential new company, don’t say bad things about the old.
Why say anything about the current/old position at all?
They don’t necessarily want you to lie, but if you say something that is honest, but brutally frank and critical about the failings and inadequacies of your current/previous employer, can they be sure it really is honest? You could be deflecting blame that you deserve; you could just be plain wrong, and a hostile, fault-finding sort of employee. Sure, they could probe with further questions to try to unravel this, but all the while they’re doing that, they’re thinking that other candidate they interviewed this morning didn’t have any of this baggage.
As to what I would suggest, thinking about what I would do in your shoes
It’s OK to admit that you had very high hopes, to the extent that you closed down your own business and moved, based on everything that was apparent in the role profile and the interview for your current job
It’s OK to say that the role didn’t turn out to be the thing you anticipated it would be, and that this was due to a lot of changes and staff and management turnover which was a continuous and ongoing issue both before and after your hire and commencement.
You can present your decision to seek alternative employment as a positive attribute. It’s not a good fit, and you are taking a decisive step to do something about that. You might be asked why you are not staying put and trying to fix the problem. I think it’s OK to acknowledge that’s beyond the likely influence of your role in the company, if that’s true. If you truly can’t turn an adverse situation around, you turn yourself around and find or create a different situation, and that’s what you’re doing.
It’s OK to be philosophical about it, in a general sense where, even with the best intentions, and the greatest personal diligence, not everything in life always turns out to be the way we predicted it would be, and when that happens, we make further choices or take further actions to deal with it.
This is one issue with most “interview advice” online – it assumes that there is a large labour surplus for the job you want, and that you are one of a hundred qualified people interviewing for that job. In that case, if there’s any situation where the potential employer has to expend any effort to find out the truth of the situation, they can just drop that candidate and stick with the many other “safe” ones.
This is not the situation in a lot of cases, and sometimes not hiring you means doing without the role for a couple of months until the next viable candidate shows up.
How much “honesty” you can reasonably do is dependent on which situation you are in.
Saying the job wasn’t a good fit is just the standard “interview game” code phrase for saying it didn’t work out for some reason. I doubt interviewers would generally pry too much beyond that, and if I did, I’d say something vague to the effect of the position wasn’t what you expected, and you’re looking for a better fit for your skills and experience. That basically implies that your employer didn’t live up to their end of the bargain, so you’re looking elsewhere, but it doesn’t actually badmouth them either.
Not badmouthing previous employers isn’t about them, it’s about YOU. If you go into an interview and badmouth your previous employers, it makes you look like you don’t have any tact or self control. The people in the interview don’t give a crap about your previous employer, but they do care about how you carry yourself, what you choose to say and NOT say, etc.
Sometimes you can lay out why you left without actually badmouthing them, if it’s something like an ethics issue- you just say that you had ethical issues with the way they were conducting their business. That way, you don’t have to go into detail, but it’s clear why you left, and it makes you look better in the bargain.
Interviews are like online dating profiles. They're exercises in salesmanship- specifically what YOU can do for them. The whole goal is to portray everything in as positive of a light as you can, without actually lying outright, or badmouthing anyone. It probably doesn't matter to them WHY you left, as long as you can explain it away in a reasonable way.Or in the OP’s case say there was a corporate culture shift due to considerable turnover after he was hired if he wants to codespeak what the actual problem was.
Very good.
They’ll ask.
Maybe. It all depends on how he puts it on his resume. 7 months is a short enough time that he could just leave it out of the resume and answer with something vague about wanting a change/time off.
Or better yet, just put the years on the resume and don’t bother with the months. Don’t even acknowledge the last job. Put the job before as “-2022”, and leave it at that. No evidence of a gap, and no reason to even bring it up.
If they get weird about why it has an end year instead of “-Present”, say the same thing- you got tired of working for yourself, wanted to change of scenery, etc…
Resumes are another example of how it’s all spin/advertising. You don’t owe them a particularly detailed or even accurate accounting of exactly when you worked or lived somewhere- just a job history. So there’s some wiggle room in how you list things.
Omitting it would work better if it wasn’t the current employer. You can gloss over a 6 or 7 month blip in the timeline, but not when you are inhabiting that blip at the time of the interview.
Very true. Then the (unspoken) question is, “Why haven’t you been working for the last seven months?”
Any sense for who has the juice here – meaning:
*Do they need you more than you need them?
*Do you need them more than they need you?
This is a difficult intangible, but … IME … makes a rather huge difference in how I might approach this.
That’s my point- if you leave the months off your resume, you’re not necessarily tipping your hand that you’ve been doing anything else for the past seven months. You’re just signaling that you aren’t doing whatever it was that you did before your current employer anymore.
I started doing that about a decade ago- it was confusing to people that I’d gone to graduate school and worked concurrently, especially with the dates listed. And it confused them if I put the education in a separate section- it looked like a two year gap. So I decided to go as minimalist as I possibly could, and only listed the years and put everything in chronological order.
Seems to be the least confusing, and lets me camouflage a six month stretch of unemployment as well.
I was unemployed for 7 months when the company I worked for went into insolvency. In the first month or two of the unemployment, my CV(resume) remained unchanged (just the previous company as ‘until present’)
After a couple more months, I had to update it. I had taken up a voluntary unpaid job for a couple of days a week, to keep myself in the habit of getting to work etc, and so this became the ‘current’ position on my CV.
When I got a full time paid job again after 7 months, I wasn’t updating my CV any more, and by the time I started looking for move on from there, I just updated it to omit the unemployed/voluntary period, since it all took place within the same calendar year.
^^^^^