Cheers,

Keith

Many of the holes in a resume are easily explained- time off to have a family, downsizing, etc. However, getting through the resume review process and getting in front of a hiring manager to explain those holes is often the challenge. Although we have many solutions to these problems, the best way to deal with this is to have a very specific resume written for a specific job. When you know the parameters of a job, you can clearly articulate whether or not your experience will meet the requirements. If so, than highlighting your experience that is job-specific will overshadow gaps or an extensive period of time out of work.

Hiring a professional with experience in both resume writing, job placement and working with hiring managers can do wonders for creating your best resume.
Ken Schmitt
http://www.turningpointsearch.net

The honesty part is crucial, and that in my experience is where corporate recruiters excel and agency recruiters fall short. But if you look at how agencies are often structured, the ‘recruiter’s are also the sales force as well, so it’s no surprise that sometimes they may be less than honest about the job. Likewise from the company side, if they’re not too proud of, or not honest about, the culture they’ve built, they’re likely to be ‘selling’ the wrong position to the wrong person. And unfortunately since the balance of power is almost terminally in favor of employers for various reasons, the candidates/employees eat it on these issues.

I work in professional ICT recruitment and employers have similar bias. Here are some questions to consider :

- Job Hopping and Redundancy, Down sizing and Restructuring are two different issues and should not be confused as the same issue.
Job Hopping is an indivual responsibility – Redundancy is an organisational responsibility.
- Job Hoppers are probably best suited to temporary or contract employment rather than permanent employment.
-Resignmation and Exit Interviews – is thjere complete honesty between both parties involved? Is this undertaken by an independant party or undertaken in house ( with obvious bias )
- Do candidates consider the cost of training and investment that employers are required to spend to get staff up to speed.
-Do employers wait and take time to select ” the Right Employye” ? Or are they just employing somoent to sit at a desk or man a station due to a resignation and the need to fill that place within the team?
- Are candidates selective about the type of opportunity they accept or are they just wanting a job? In my 25 years experience both candidates and employers fail baddly around this criteria.
- what is the level of assesment required to fill requirement?
- in order to retain good staff a company needs to challenge, develop and grow an individual.
- employees also need to start understanding that job hopping does not inspire confidence in the employer and poses a larger risk to the company when assessing the individual.

There is always likely to be bias involved as this is just human nature, the trick is to realise when the bias is getting in the way of selecting good applicants.

Our role as recruiters is to advocate on behalf of good candidates and to educate those candidates about the perceptions in the market around there job hopping behaviours.

The intelligent leveraging of a validated and normed personality assessment tool can significantly reduce the likelihood of an employee leaving after a short tenure and mitigate the negative results engendered by overconcern with hiring the apparent “job-hopper.”

The problem with the linked article which sites the Evolv results is that it’s not broken down by employment/career level. Job hopping may be a bigger deal the further up the corporate ladder you go. What happens in call centers is not necessarily informative of what will happen at higher levels or in different environments where turnover is much lower to begin with. There could be a healthy amount of pre selection of groups for favorable results here.

However that still doesn’t mean job hopping is bad at any level, it just means we’d need more comprehensive data to figure out where it may or may not be a valid concern. I would also see some concerns as to the low number of actual job hoppers included in the Evolv study. When you read it you see a very small percentage of people actually were job hoppers by their own definition. To get a more conclusive study it would be interesting to see roughly equal numbers of hoppers to non hoppers compared. I’d also want a stricter definition of what a ‘hopper’ is applied, as I don’t think it was even done in this study. Holding ‘many’ jobs in the last 5 years is subjective.

In the end it’s still something we have to account for as recruiters. If someone has a ‘hopper’ history but every company they worked for went bust in a recession, or moved operations offshore soon after they joined, I’d hold that as a lot less relevant than if they left/got fired from the same amount of companies. The real question is what defines successful hires for your company/client, not what is the best way to cover your ass and not make a bad hire.