Why Job Hopping Looks Bad - and How to Fix It

It’s only natural to seek out change if you’re unsatisfied with where you’re at.

If you’re early in your career, there’s nothing wrong with trying a few different things to get an idea of what suits you. It takes some experimenting to find the right path.

However, there are a few situations you should be aware of that always look bad, and I’ll explain why. In short - they increase your risk as a future “poor hire.” Here’s how to avoid those scenarios!

1) Trying to achieve your goals extremely quickly. If you are switching companies every 6-9 months to get bigger and better positions, more pay, etc., that pays off in the short run, but in the long run, your reputation as only being out for yourself will come back to bite you. I see this all too often in young, hungry, entrepreneurial folks who want to grow and achieve their goals NOW - be VP by 30, own their own wildly profitable business and retire by 40, and the like.

The problem is not that you’re hungry for growth. And hey, you deserve to make good money and have great opportunities and develop your skills.

The problem is that you are sacrificing the needs of everyone else you do business with for your own self-interest.

When you leave a company after such a short time period, then all the time and energy that went into training you, coaching you, mentoring you - it’s lost for the leaders that helped build you. That’s a poor investment for them. They naturally want to see the fruits of their labor - they want you to grow, but with them! They want the newfound capabilities they’ve cultivated in you to pay off in you growing their business, improving their customer relationships, increasing sales, training and leading others to help them grow, and in improving your results year after year by taking your lessons learned - your mistakes, your observations - and building a newer and better version of how they do things each and every cycle.

The customers you’ve built relationships with feel a bit betrayed if you leave so soon. They won’t necessarily tell you, but from the perspective of a leader who’s picked up the pieces after someone job hopped - they definitely tell the people you work with that you left behind.

The team you worked with, especially if they reported to you, often feels perhaps you weren’t genuine when you built those relationships with them, promised to invest in them, to help them grow, to mentor them, to work hand in hand. You left before the job was done.

The leaders you gave notice to so soon after they hired you walk away wishing they would have known you were only in it for what you could get out of it and then off to the newest, shiniest thing. You may have caused damage for them with their clients or customers and by extension damaged your employer or manager’s reputation. Your demonstrated lack of commitment leads them to wonder:

• were you dishonest about your intentions?

• perhaps you’re inconsiderate

• are there lessons learned here - perhaps I shouldn’t have trusted this person and will be more cautious about hiring up-and-comers in the future

This relational and reputational damage hurts you more than you know. While you’re off in the honeymoon phase of another company, the company you left behind is still there, and if they’re a good group, you can bet they have great relationships across companies and within your industry. Your reputation will catch up to you.

Please note - there are times when it’s necessary to be out for yourself 100%, but they should be few and far between. And there are plenty of articles out there to help you determine if you’re in a toxic workplace, the wrong industry, or the wrong career path which suggests you should make a switch.

If you find yourself looking for bigger and better as soon as you’ve scratched the surface of your current job, you are probably missing out on the bigger picture.

2) Leaving anytime the going gets rough. Perhaps it’s a poor review, or a negative interaction with your boss, or frustration over something that didn’t go the way you felt strongly it should.

How you handle adversity says so much more about you than just about anything else in life.

Do you buckle down and get to work, come up with a better strategy, give a pep talk to the team, find the light at the end of the tunnel?

Or do you backchannel your frustration, gossip about your boss, start searching job boards, or armor up and decide to emotionally cut off the people around you and further erode the trust you felt was broken?

It takes courage to stick it out. It takes being vulnerable to share when you’re upset, and you have to extend some basic level of trust and goodwill to repair situations that have broken. If you are with a company that is even half-decent, they should be receptive to trying to work things out. They don’t want to lose you. No one is perfect, and often we expect our leaders to be and when that image is hit with a dose of reality, it’s important to not let that poison you and make you jaded.

How would you respond to your mom, or your best friend, or your child if they did something that disappointed you? Would you throw them out? Or would you get in the trenches and try to work to make things right?

3) You’re bored and want more. You want to grow, try new things, handle more responsibility, increase your pay and expand your influence. This is a great thing! It means you’ve mastered what you’re doing now and ready for the next step.

The key in this situation is to tell your supervisor and ask for a specific development plan on a specific timeline. Ask for additional responsibility and exposure to higher-level projects and leadership. Any half-decent boss should respond positively to this request.

Tell them what you are afraid of so they can address those specific concerns. If you’re afraid that you’ll be passed up for promotion, or that there might be better paying jobs and opportunities out there, you need to share that (respectfully) so that they can respond accordingly. If you feel you are currently underpaid, share that and provide examples to support your concerns. Give your company the opportunity to do right by you. If you job hop, and you didn’t at least give that conversation a fighting chance, then you’ve done yourself and your company a big disservice.

You may be surprised to get everything that you ask for - and being invested in, cared about and highly regarded is one of the biggest gifts a company can give yo u - it’s a golden ticket to a bigger and brighter future. You might hear that you are meeting expectations, but not going above and beyond enough to warrant a promotion - and get valuable feedback that will help you to level up quicker. Or, you may find that a promotion was waiting in the wings for you and if you had jumped ship, you would have missed it!