How To Best Explain Why You’re Moving Jobs

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General Notes

  • Employers scrutinize drivers behind job changes in hopes of determining an applicant’s potential longevity, their ability to succeed or both.
  • It’s important to mention your desire to remain at your next company for an extended period of time.
  • Try to have the reasoning behind leaving make you appear level-headed, competent and reasonable.
  • Keep the reasons business-oriented not personal.

Why Employers Ask This

Employers are afraid of turnovers and rightfully so.  Every time an employee leaves, someone has to go out find and interview candidates. Then, someone has to train the new candidate.  In the meantime, employee moral decreases and workload increases.

Additionally, customer service can be a person short. This can start bad reviews and all other types of issues. Therefore, this question is critical to answer in a manner that makes any situation look positive.

Employers Often Focus on the Downside

The human brain tends to give weight to negative experiences or interactions more than so than positive ones. This is referred to this as negativity bias as it causes people to focus on one bad thing in a mountain of good things.  Therefore, make sure you answer this question correctly at risk of losing all the effort you put in to be flawless at other interviewing topics.

No employee is perfect, no boss is perfect nor is any company. However, many employers are not confident in their ability to manage. Therefore, they don’t adhere to these rules as they want to avoid pain more than they want to seek opportunity.

Wrong Impressions Lose Job Offers

Do not allow hiring managers to come to their own conclusions. When they assume, they do so incorrectly often skewed to the negative as opposed to giving the benefit of the doubt.

With that being said, employers will carefully scrutinize your answers to determine if there is even a slight hint of any of the following in what answers.  They do not give the benefit of the doubt if any of the below are detected in your answers.

  • Performance Issues
  • Manageability Issues
  • Collaboration Issues
  • Reliability Issues
  • Personality Issues

General Strategy

There are two main strategies to describe job departures. In many instances, candidates will want to pick a combination of the two reasons.

  1. Recruited for specific talents by another company.
  2. Describing an issue with the business, business strategy or industry.
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