So you're looking for a job and need to explain to a recruiter why you've been job-hopping.  First, you need to understand job-hopping from the recruiter's point of view. A recruiter sees job-hopping as a red flag. They're concerned that you will ditch the company six months later. To effectively explain job-hopping to a recruiter, you need to revise your work history by filling in the gaps.

The recruiter's perspective

For each job, a recruiter wants to know<ul><li>What you've learned</li><li>What you've experienced</li><li>How you grew your skills</li><li>Why you left your job.</li></ul> Walk the recruiter through your job-hopping history by talking about what you learned and how you learned even more at the next job. Then state that you are now clear in the value you can bring and what you want in a job and that you are currently looking to stay put and do a good job.

What a recruiter wants to know

So you're looking for a job and need to explain why you've been job-hopping to a recruiter. How can you effectively explain your job-hopping habit without disqualifying yourself as a job candidate?

Stashed ideas

How To Explain Job-Hopping To A Recruiter

Persuading others, and even ourselves is about more than just putting facts out there and letting the chips fall as they may. You simply can’t have the impact you want with facts alone.The first thing we do when people disagree with us is attempt to educate them by giving them the facts. When this fails, when people have the same information we have and reach a different conclusion than we have, we consider them idiots.

You’re Going to Need More Than Facts

Faced with a choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof.

While you have to understand the facts and arguments, you really need to understand what’s already in their head and how those ideas got there in the first place before you can change someone’s mind.

Persuading Others

Persuasion isn’t always here’s the facts, you’re either an idiot or you’re not. It’s here are the facts and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind. And it’s the facts plus the sensitivity when convolved together create impact.

Humans are tribal. We evolved in small groups where it was a bad idea to stand out. When we’re faced with a choice between being correct or being accepted, more often than not we choose the latter.

Our Desire To Be Accepted

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

Changing our minds can result in a perception that we’re losing status. We need psychological safety in order to do it. We need to know that we’re not going to lose a friend. We need to know that promotions are not affected by disagreement.One of the reasons it’s easier to argue with a spouse is because of that ring on your finger. A wedding band represents a promise to each other that you are not going anywhere (easily). Friends are another interesting example. If we are arguing with a friend, we know that we have disagreed with them before and we have not lost the friendship.

Psychological Safety

When it comes to changing our minds two things that stand out are: <ul><li>it’s best done by someone we like</li><li>group settings influence what we think.</li></ul>We’re most likely persuaded by people we like. When’s the last time you didn’t like or respect someone and they convinced you to change your mind? It almost never happens.People we don’t like can’t persuade us. All the logic in the world won’t change your mind if you dislike the person being logical.

Changing Our Minds

<ul><li>When we’re alone we don’t have to admit to others what changed our mind. In fact, we often don’t know what changed our mind. If we watch a documentary on sugar and resolve to eat less sugar we might not know which part of the argument changed our mind, we only know that we’re convinced.</li><li>We also know that there is a difference between changing our mind and socializing it. We don’t have to tell others we’re eating less sugar — that’s very specific. Instead, if they notice that our diet has changed we can simply tell them we’re eating healthy and avoid a possible confrontation.</li></ul>

Going Through A Change Of Mine Alone Is Easier

It's tempting to think that rock solid facts are the best way to win someone over to your point of view. But you'd be wrong. So if facts, don't persuade, what will?

Facts Are Not Enough

Unfortunately, too many resumes are filled with fluff statements anyone can say and they don't really distinguish you as a top candidate.A resume filled with terms such as "visionary" (how many of these do you really know?), "motivated," "team player," "problem solver," "results-oriented," "dynamic," and many other phrases are examples of overused words.

Resume Fluff

Replace the use of terms that describe character with specific content to demonstrate how you accomplished or achieved something. Shed some light on your method of execution. A resume should not include soft skills.<ul><li>For instance, to show you were "results-oriented," indicate on your resume how you increased sales in your department by XX percent within a year or increased the number of attendees to an annual conference by XX percent compared to previous years.</li><li>If you don't have numbers, you can approximate percentages: "Introduced new procedures that slashed cycle times approximately 20%.</li></ul>

Don't Rely On Terms That Describe Character (Soft Skills)

Numbers and symbols quickly jump out at employers so use them whenever you can. Resumes have their own special rules and I always show all numbers as digits as they catch the eye. Percentages are always best as they show the impact of your efforts.Avoid words that aren't specific, such as "many," "few," and "several."

Use Numbers And Symbols

The problem with writing responsibilities you held on the job is it doesn't tell an employer how successful you were at executing your plans. An employer only cares about how good you did your job and how what you did can apply to the job they are offering.Rather than list responsibilities, demonstrate your performance.<ul><li>Are you the most senior member of your team?</li><li>Do people turn to you for the more challenging issues?</li><li>Is your level of accuracy and the quality of your work at the highest level?</li><li>Have you demonstrated the ability to meet aggressive deadlines?</li></ul>

Don't List Responsibilities Of Your Previous Jobs, Demonstrate Outcomes

Today's employers expect candidates to know basic computer skills and programs, so only list specialized technical skills that are relevant for the job. An employer does not need to see you know programs such as Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.Also, when you do list any technical skill, tell an employer how well you know the specific program by detailing what you may have created or done with it. Simply listing a specific program will not help an employer understand how well you know it or what your capabilities are.

Only Detail Specialized Technical Skills

You don't need to fluff your resume. You just need to get a hiring manager's attention. Here's how to turn resume fluff into quantifiable accomplishments.

4 Ways To Turn Resume Fluff Into Marketable Facts

“If you aren’t one of the first 20 people to apply on LinkedIn, you’re probably not going to get seen,” stated J.T. O’Donnell, founder and CEO of Work It Daily, a career coaching platform.

Apply Early

Make sure you list them if you have them or acquire them if you don’t. Don’t chase your own tail by applying to a job you’re unlikely to get.
Small skills count too. Are you proficient at Excel? List it. Your odds of getting an interview and a job if you have a facility with Microsoft Office goes up hugely.

Get Those Skills

If you took a year off to write the Great American Novel, say so. 
Otherwise, it will look like you were doing nothing, and you might be screened out.

Don't Leave Any Gaps

To some extent, this means using the same phrases in your application materials as you see in the listing, even if that can feel a little cheap.
Being robotic is good if you’re talking to a robot. That does not mean, however, that you should game the system and use terms that don’t actually apply to you.

All Docs Need To Be Consistent

Skills are changing faster than ever. Rather than learning every new technology, you might be better off explaining that in the past you’ve been good at picking up new software. That might include using words like “transformation,” “migration,” or “upgrade,” and really explaining how you handled change at other jobs. “What employers are looking for is agility.
If you can demonstrate that in your story, and pull those elements out when you’re in person, you have the best shot.

Show Your Resilience

Try to outsmart the algorithm, or try to actually get in touch with someone who works at the company. 
That way, you’ll at least have a shot to tell your story. If you apply online because they say apply, you also have to work your back channels.

Get To A Human

Create a list of the requirements you are looking for in a new job —you will often discover that the list you make is too long. 
It’s one thing to not want to sell yourself short, it’s another to be so specific that you find absolutely nothing is the right fit. Her advice: Shorten your list to two or three things you really need.

Rethink Priorities

It’s easiest to get a job if you’ve got one. 
You automatically seem appropriate for a similar position, and you avoid gaps in your résumé.

Keep Your Current Job

Rather than looking for people who have exactly the skills in the job description, look for those who have attributes similar to your best employees — those who are most productive or who’ve stayed with the company longest. 
This also means making sure your algorithm isn’t unnecessarily excluding huge swaths of candidates, including parents who’ve stepped out of the workforce to care for kids, people with criminal backgrounds, or those with gaps in their employment.

Fix Your AI Screenings

Make sure job descriptions are up to date and that they focus on the core skills the person absolutely needs. 
This requires involving the person who’s directly supervising or working with the candidate to weigh in on what’s needed for the job.

Update JDs

Be early, get to a human: Tips from experts for making your job search better.

How to get your résumé past the robot reading it

Understanding human factors are especially important as we develop new models for remote work. Managers could use human factors research to shape a remote work environment with fewer sustained work hours and fewer concurrent projects that in turn fosters more secure development practices.

Human Factors when Developing new methods for Remote Work

Software sustainment groups often churn out fixes that are narrowly scoped, without consideration for the global view. Effective software solutions require collaboration, leverage experience, and provide analysis of the architecture and design applied to meet the requirements.Some ‘just works’ patterns arise from time pressures, narrow mindsets, and lack of experience.

Overcoming the 'Just Works' Mindset

<ol><li>Learn and apply relevant patterns and idioms.</li><li>Create a defined context for your coding effort.</li><li>Learn and apply modern quality assurance practices and tools.</li></ol>

Overcoming the ‘Just works’ mindset

Engineering large, complex systems and systems-of-systems cannot be done in isolation. Engineers must create interfaces among software components and subsystems and set expectations for how the systems may behave when interacting. Groups of strong individual contributors accustomed to working problems alone may not easily transition to this collaborative setting.

Moving from Individual Contributors to a Collaborative Mindset

Team-building exercises can be viewed as soft by some organizations. However, their value has been proved through research showing that people are more likely to share an idea and accept feedback from someone with whom they regularly engage on topics not directly related to work.

Team Building Exercises

COVID-19 has created social distancing protocols that mandate remote work for many employees. The extra effort needed to stay connected to team members is more widely understood. Savvy managers will have remote members at the top of their checklists when making decisions that affect their teams, demonstrating that priority to the entire team in everyday actions. Virtual brown bag lunch situations and happy hours have enabled connections and team building, and have generally positive effects on well-being.

Covid and Remote Work

<ul><li>The array of contributors that feed into a large software effort create a number of potential concerns. </li><li>Software delivered from contributors will be of varying quality, style, and structure. </li><li>The integration into a larger system creates the potential for complex issues. </li><li>Engineering organizations that feed into the DoD do not always deliver systems that include comprehensive architecture and design considerations.</li></ul>Solution: Accept that large systems may require extra people power to integrate, test, and maintain. Over time, some engineers develop a deep, organic understanding of a system.

DoD Code at Large Vs. General Issues

In organizations where professional-development opportunities are limited, team members’ working problems alone will not develop and enhance their skills and may not advance their careers. One solution is to Incentivize teams through alignment with industry pay practices. Organizations can create rewards for teams and individuals who improve product iteration latency through the use of reuse, COTS, open-source, and open standards.

Government Employment Complexities

It is important to know more about these issues because an increasing amount of empirical evidence points us in this direction. Also, we believe that there is a need to change what is made available to the practitioners today in terms of software engineering knowledge, and make them realize the importance of these issues and incorporate them into everyday project development and management practices.

The Importance of People Issues

Navigating People Concerns when Transitioning from Sustainment to Engineering Software-Reliant Systems

In Tetris, you’re only playing against time and the never-ending flow of pieces from top to bottom. The mindset is internally focused — you are challenging yourself to correctly manipulate a random stream of inputs into an orderly configuration. There’s no final boss. No blame to assign.The real game of life is completely internal. There really are no big, bad enemies who exist to make you suffer. There is no absolute right or wrong move that a certain opponent can punish. And your score can increase to infinity if you just push yourself harder.&nbsp;

In life, your only opponent is yourself

Some games get harder the longer you play, including chess. Positions get more complicated, opponents become more challenging, the stakes increase. You have a public rating, and thus more to lose when you play the same opponents.Not Tetris. The game remains the same from Piece One until you run out of space on the screen. The only thing that changes is the speed.In Tetris, more often than not, we challenge ourselves. We are not content with simply making one row at a time. We push ourselves to get a Tetris — four rows simultaneously. It’s the name of the game.

In life, things don’t get harder — they just get faster

Chess comes with a set of prescriptions and best practices. 1. e4 is considered a strong opening move for white. 1. h3 is not. That’s because chess is a closed system. There are no random constraints, no dumb luck. The pieces always move the same, and the starting position is always identical.Tetris? You only know what the next piece is. You play for the present moment, trying to construct the best possible configuration of pieces, knowing that it is impossible to predict the situation even two pieces from now. You don’t get fooled into thinking you can control the future.

In life, you can’t control the board

In chess, you’ll get to see your opponent tip over his king in resignation. You’ll see the final tournament scores posted. You’ll feel the satisfaction of victory — unless, one day, you don’t.

In life, no one tells you when you’ve won

From the age of seven, I played chess constantly and competitively. I played in school, online, at national competitions. Chess taught me patience, perseverance, critical thinking — crucial skills…

Your Life Is Tetris. Stop Playing It Like Chess.

How you structure your resume depends on the depth of your work experience.<ul><li>Chronological style: Listing work history in reverse chronological order can help emphasise a steady record of relevant employment. Explain gaps, for example, maternity leave, travel, study, etc.</li><li>Functional style: Organising your work history by highlighting key skills and achievements is fitting for those without an extensive working history.</li><li>Hybrid style: Combining both the chronological and functional resume styles is useful for mid-level roles that require an employment history and specific skills.</li></ul>

Hook your audience

A ten-page resume that goes into detail about every small-scale job or piece of technology used in the last 20 years will dilute your essential strengths.&nbsp;<ul><li>Avoid redundant statements that cannot be backed up by immediate evidence - for example, ‘ I work well individually and in a team’.&nbsp;</li><li>Avoid distracting designs or imagery.</li><li>Ensure sure your resume is readable, with consistent fonts and sizes.</li></ul>

How To Keep It Short And Clean

<ul><li>State your full name and contact details at the top of the header.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Help the reader by including a visible link to your online portfolio, Linkedin account or Github account.&nbsp;</li><li>When listing previous workplaces, adopt a consistent structure.&nbsp;</li><li>For each employer, include the dates started and ended, the title and the company. Include a URL or a one-line description of a company, especially for lesser-known businesses.</li></ul>

The Basics

<ul><li>Familiarize yourself with an advertised job. Show in your resume how your skills match what they're looking for.</li><li>Be intentional. An employer is often looking for clues that show your understanding of codes and systems, and your ability to work with unfamiliar code.</li></ul>

Show you're the best fit for the job

General skills to add to your resume (if you have them):&nbsp;<ul><li>Proficiency in either computer science, computer programming, data structures or algorithms.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>An understanding of software design best practices.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Ability to quickly learn and reverse engineer code.&nbsp;</li><li>Confidence in writing algorithms.&nbsp;</li><li>Capabilities in similar disciplines.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Strong knowledge of fundamentals - functional programming, data structures and algorithmic programming&nbsp;</li></ul>

Don’t neglect the obvious

Consider highlighting the exciting parts of your career story.<ul><li>Highlight the level of leadership and responsibility you’ve had.</li><li>If your past projects have involved new technology, emphasize an innovative narrative.&nbsp;</li><li>As a short-term contractor, you might demonstrate consistency by specifying that your role was extended due to high performance.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>Emphasise the completion of projects before each exit.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Add character to your resume

The best software engineer resumes will help an employer understand how a previous project or workplace ties into the position they’re hiring for.&nbsp; Ensure your employment history contains a few bullet points about key skills and achievements. The aim is to demonstrate the impact and value of your time.

Use specific metrics and accomplishments

Add accomplishment-driven statements, metrics and numbers. It can help indicate the success and value of your past roles. <ul><li>Instead of generic statements explain the results of your involvement.&nbsp;</li><li>How many new downloads did it attract?</li><li>Did it improve the cost efficiency of your business?</li><li>Get specific with the accomplishments.</li></ul>

Results

The most successful resumes include a proof of concept (POC) that references actual achievements or ownership of a project. A POC demonstrates the processes and best practices used to achieve key results. <ul><li>Add personal projects and freelance work. It demonstrates your passion and could help set you apart.</li><li>Show your projects through GitHub. Include URLs to specific projects.</li></ul>

Projects

Specialization in software engineering include:<ul><li>Games and entertainment systems: Designing applications or software that can be used in games.</li><li>Software engineers can specialise in computer systems that have dedicated functions in a larger mechanical or electrical system.</li><li>Modelling and simulation: Designing or maintaining applications that simulate specific processes to reduce the need for costly testing.&nbsp;</li><li>Networking and distributed systems: Skills involving expertise in network architecture, application layers and network security.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Lean into your specialization

Soft skills you could incorporate into your resume:&nbsp;<ul><li>A continuous learning attitude can be shown through a Github account, leadership or Meetups.</li><li>If you haven’t been able to work with emerging technologies in your job, demonstrate this in projects you’ve worked on outside of your work.</li><li>Presentation ability can be shown through leading regular standups with other team members.</li></ul>

Soft skills

Software engineers who want to work in a tech-based environment need to demonstrate their ability to work seamlessly with product teams and developers that operate in an agile framework.&nbsp;For senior roles, hiring managers will look for people that have worked in more complex and challenging environments.&nbsp;If you’re interested in front end, get more UI experience and work with Javascript, or if you’re interested in architecture, get involved in projects with heavy infrastructure.

Highlight your working methodology

While the debate still continues regarding the long term future of the “resume”, it’s still one of the most important documents to get right if you want to secure that next big job interview. That’s…

How to write a Software Engineering resume (CV): the definitive guide (Updated for 2019)

Don’t let your ego get in the way of the team/company. Detach the result from the process and detach emotions from learnings.Take pride in HOW you build your product, but detach your emotions and identity FROM the product. Reacting emotionally from the results reflects immaturity and inability to make rational &amp; unbiased decisions. A failed project is only a failure if you didn’t learn from it or gained valuable insights about the product and your users.

Kill Your Darlings

From an engineering perspective, the philosophy of Occam’s Razor is— “the simplest solution is usually the right one”.&nbsp;When there is overwhelming complexity in a proposed architecture or solution, take a step back, re-evaluate what you’re really trying to solve/build and think if there is a much simpler way to get to the same goal.

Occam’s Razor / Do The Simple Thing First

The best software engineers are often ones who have a combination of coding and very strong soft skills.Engineering isn’t just about building things, it’s also figuring out what’s the right thing to build and also convincing others.

The Underrated Importance of Soft Skills

The idea is to give engineers full end-to-end ownership of a project from planning to launch. The goal is to empower individuals, create accountability and reduce dependencies. We avoid dependencies on managers to tell the team what to do, and increase reliance on the team to self-organize and figure out how to proceed

(Extreme) Ownership

I joined Facebook as a software engineer (9/6/2016) and today is my four year “Faceversary” (9/6/2020). I want to take the opportunity to reflect and organize my thoughts around some of the most…

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Elizabeth Palmer
@elizabpa

How To Explain Job-Hopping To A Recruiter

Facts Are Not Enough

4 Ways To Turn Resume Fluff Into Marketable Facts

How to get your résumé past the robot reading it

Navigating People Concerns when Transitioning from Sustainment to Engineering Software-Reliant Systems

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Elizabeth Palmer@elizabpa

How To Explain Job-Hopping To A Recruiter

Facts Are Not Enough

4 Ways To Turn Resume Fluff Into Marketable Facts

How to get your résumé past the robot reading it

Navigating People Concerns when Transitioning from Sustainment to Engineering Software-Reliant Systems

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Elizabeth Palmer
@elizabpa