When sifting through piles of CVs it amazes me how many people are deeply impressed by CVs showing a long string of jobs. When you point out this means the candidate offers poor stability they have to agree, but with great reluctance.
Do people really think that? Twits.
When I started it was a common belief that you could reasonably leave a job within 1 month or after 2 years. In between was an orange flag worth investigating.
Nowadays we have the wretched "gig economy" and "hire-and-fire".
It is reasonable for consultants to have had 40 clients, but not employees to have had 40 employers.
Yeah. There's a matter of proportion though.
Many recruiters make generalizations, and like all generalizations, these are flawed. But I've certainly seen what coppice described.
- For people having had only one or a couple employers: recruiters may see this as a sign of someone inflexible, stuck to a routine, possibly not looking for challenges, in turn possibly hard to manage. And in a world where staying in the same job your whole life is now an oddity, may be seen as a sign that the candidate just had trouble finding another job.
- For people having had many jobs, sure on one hand it shows instability, but OTOH it shows that many other recruiters have chosen the candidate, so it gives social proof. Social proof is an important part of recruiting in general. On top of giving some social proof, it shows that the candidate may be more flexible and easier to get rid of if needed.
Of course none of this says if a candidate would be a good fit for a given job, but that's relatively common shit, especially for HR people, who care less about the technical aspects and more about how easy a given person will be to handle.