Don’t Let Job Hopping Derail Your Resume

There was a time in American history where it may have been fairly common for an individual to hold a single job—or at least work for a single employer—for 10, 20, sometimes 30 or more years. But things have changed: Today, it’s much more common for individuals to hold several jobs over the course of a lifetime, changing positions, employers, and sometimes even changing industries.

In fact, some statistics show that the 42 percent of all employees change their job every one to two years—a phenomenon known as job hopping. This is an especially common practice among millennials, who are ever in search of personal development and career progression. There is nothing wrong with job hopping, and for some employees it can indeed provide a path to professional fulfilment. Where things get tricky is when you write your resume.

How Job Hopping Impacts Your Resume

The thing is, hiring managers and recruiters don’t necessarily want to spend time and money to get a new employee, train that employee, immerse that employee in company culture… and then lose that employee in just a few months’ time. Employers want a commitment—and whether you are really able to make that commitment or not, it’s important to have a resume that downplays your job hopping and brings some sense of cohesion to your professional experience.

This is all entirely possible, but it depends on the construction of your resume. Here are some tips we’d recommend.

How to Downplay Job Hopping on Your Resume

Include a professional summary, which should consolidate all your career experience into a single narrative. Maybe you’ve worked for five different marketing companies in the last decade. You can present that like this: “Marketing professional with 10 years of diverse experience.” Show how all the pieces in your career history come together. Identify the unifying threads. Guide the reader through the basic trajectory of your professional life.

Offer a summary of previous employment. Rather than going into great detail about your last dozen jobs, you might instead want to focus ample attention to the three or four most recent, and then provide a bulleted list of previous career experience. Rather than list a specific time frame for each of these bulleted items, just provide an overall, collective start and end date, i.e., Previous Employment, 2000-2008.

Tell a story with your different jobs and positions. The important thing is to convey some sense of narrative, which in some instances may mean leaving out positions that don’t relate to the big picture; if you primarily work in accounting, you might leave off that one summer where you worked as a cashier at CVS. Also try to emphasize how each new position brought you increased responsibility. Show that you have been growing, not just changing jobs on a whim.

Focus on accomplishments. If you were only at one employer for 18 months and basically twiddled your thumbs, that doesn’t really reflect well on you; but if you actually got a lot of major projects done in that short span of time, that’s altogether more positive. Make sure each section of your resume highlights concrete achievements and meaningful accomplishments.

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