Ramit Sethi explains why jumping jobs every 2-3 years is normal for ambitious people, but 6-10 month stints look bad to hiring managers. He says to frame moves as seeking bigger responsibility and accomplished results, and if you keep bailing early, use his dream job framework to figure out what you actually want.
Okay, this question is from Roy. Roy asks. Just wanted to know what you thought about job hopping. Sometimes you need to change jobs to avoid getting caught up in layoffs. Okay. Job hoppers are one of the more popular questions that I get. People say I've jumped from company to company and it doesn't look too good on my resume. What am I supposed to do about that? I have two thoughts on this. The first is that top performers are actually frequent job hoppers. So they are not staying at a company for 30 years and then cashing in their retirement. That's not what happens anymore. In fact, top performers will leave after two to three years on purpose. Why? Because they want to have rapid growth early in their careers and at a certain point they kind of plateau and then they want to go and do another challenge. Bigger responsibilities, more strategic and etc. So a high competence trigger is actually someone that has moved multiple jobs, usually in an increasing fashion over multiple years. Two to three years is sort of the default state for a top performer to move from one company to the other. Now there's a downside to this though, and that is that sometimes you see people jumping from company to company every six, eight, ten months. Now that is a low competence trigger. That's a big problem as a hiring manager. If I look at someone like that, what do you think? I think, what's the first thing that goes through my head? What's wrong with this person? Why do they keep making poor decisions? I question their decision making ability. I question their ability to stay at a company. It's kind of like if you're like looking for a husband and all of a sudden you see this guy who's like, never had a long term relationship and his longest relationship is like two weeks and he's like, no, no, no different this time. Well, odds suggest perhaps it's not different this time. So what you need to do is be aware of that. There is a message being sent, what we call a meta message in dream job. And the hiring manager sitting there looking at your resume and they are thinking this before you even say it. You need to have an answer for that. If you leave every two to three years, there's no issue with that at all. You calmly explain, look, I join, really wanted to soak up my knowledge, add a ton of value to the company. I was able to increase sales 16% and double conversions. And at a certain point I really felt like I'd mastered that job and I wanted to take on a bigger level of responsibility. Perfect answer. Perfect. However, if you if you left after six months once, there can be a good answer for that. You know, I had personal issue or I just realized that this wasn't a good fit for me and I really wanted to focus on a company with a little bit more growth potential. If you do that twice or three times, you got a big problem. My suggestion to you is it's probably not about the company. It's probably about you, in truth. So what I would suggest to you is find a job, stick with it for two years, three years. I know that's tough, but what you're showing me by jumping every six months is that you're not doing your homework ahead of time. You're just jumping sort of arbitrarily to this different job. And that can really come back to bite you in the ass. If you have three or four jumps like that, it starts looking really bad. So job hopping can work to the point where you're doing it every two to three years. You're doing it strategically. If you're jumping every six months because you don't know what you love, that's your problem. You need to handle that. Do your homework beforehand. Use the dream job testing framework, the one that I'm going to show you in some of the courses. And you need to focus on sticking at a company and showing that you can persevere. So that is how I think about job hoppers. That is how a lot of hiring managers think about them as well. And. And that is how you can use that insight to your advantage. Good question.
