How to Tackle Job Hopping In Your Resume
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Since every new recruit needs a period to settle down and acclimatize to new surroundings, employers consider a period of loss on each new recruit before he or she starts giving ROI. Return on investment is the first and last concern of every employer and job hoppers who may leave before ensuring full return on investment, or as soon as the going gets tough have a lesser chance of being recruited than those with longer periods of service with other employers.
Job-hopping may be natural, but it makes good recruiters wary
Any recruiter will go for a better candidate, and any candidate will go for a better job. If a series of progressively better job offers occur in somebody's life, it would be unnatural to think that he or she would not be job-hopping but stick with a lesser alternative, just out of the fear of making future recruiters unhappy.
However, recruiters too have their own logic about the situation, and the phenomenon of job-hopping requires a bit of care and explanation, if it cannot be glossed over and bypassed. Recruiters often view job-hoppers as either money-minded careerists or social mismatches, whose first job at desk, every morning, would be to access a job search site on the internet. Neither an employee nor an employer likes to feel used, and recruiters feel that job hoppers might end up only using the company as a temporary shelter and a launching pad for his or her career. That is something any good recruiter would like to avoid.
Job-hopping is neither a sin, nor a mistake, but a badge of honor
Recruiters are aware that the presence of job-hopping on somebody's resume, by itself, is ample proof that not all recruiters have bias, or that the candidate has the potential to add value and have been viewed as a prized asset by different recruiters.
What the candidate has to prove here is that he or she has performed and delivered for each employer sufficiently to ensure ROI for the employer and was not summed as a losing bargain. To this end, performance records, as well as recommendation letters from previous employers work best. For any job-hopping employee, it is essential to leave each employer on good terms, and recommendation letters should prove a series of satisfied employers. That's how you can turn your job-hopping into an incentive for recruiting you rather than allow it to work against you.
It is natural if a recruiter shows reluctance to accept a job-hopper
The best companies look for employees as long-term assets and the worst recruiters look for people to use on the short run. So, a recruiter who views a job-hopper as a risk is essentially one who is concerned over the viability of the candidate as a long-term asset. On the other hand, a recruiter who goes out actively for job hoppers is really one who has the use-and-throw mentality, and is aware that the employer's work pattern produces frequent employee burnouts.
Resumes that focus on work rather than time are best to gloss over job-hopping
Mismatches do occur between people and their surroundings, and it is not unexpected. Even the best scientists in the history of mankind like Sir Isaac Newton or Thomas Edison were considered as poor and backward students because they could not fit into their surroundings. However, for a recruiter, an employee who knows how to manage social interaction is definitely a better asset for the workplace, and people who seem to be poor in social interaction constitute a poor choice. A functional resume that focuses on work and accomplishments helps to club shorter service stints as “additional experience” and focus more on achievements rather than on the period of service. If you have had a history of job hopping, it is always better for you to avoid narrating your service history according to time periods but according to how and where you gained relevant work-experience and had relevant achievements.
