What’s your problem? Job hopping is usually your actual problem. Your ability to repeatedly search for and land jobs demonstrates you’re not afraid of job hunting and you’re confident in your personal skills and abilities.
If job hopping is uncommon in your business, then it’s likely an umbrella for a cluster of problems dealing with your being in the wrong industry or profession. Rather than looking at your job hopping as the problem, try to determine the reasons for the job hopping. What are you looking for that you haven’t found? Why do you leave your jobs? What is it about the new positions that entice you? If job hopping is common in your industry, then your excessive movement is a single problem . . . and not as much of one as you might fear.
Your job hopping is only an objective problem if it’s uncommon in your industry or profession. If it’s common practice, yet you’re not happy about it, you’re looking at it emotionally rather than rationally. If everyone else is job hopping too, then it won’t be a problem for employers, and it shouldn’t be a problem to you.
Obviously the key information to uncover is whether your job hopping is unusual in the context of your industry. If it isn’t, then you’ve all the information you need to defend yourself against external or internal doubts. If it is, you need to research your own job history, demonstrating that each move has been a logical one, made to a position of greater responsibility. Analyze your own career to the degree that you can make a case for your movements being a logical progression.
In a business in which people move around often, you’ll never be able to generate sufficient trust for someone to believe you’ll be there for the duration. All you can do is show your sincerity to stick around for as long as the job is rewarding and fulfilling. This isn’t that big a deal, since in such a business no one expects any more from you. If you’re in a business in which people don’t shift jobs often, you’ll need to pull out all the stops to demonstrate your belief that, after many years of searching, you’ve finally found a home.
If you’re rejected because of excessive job hopping your best chance at turning the no around is to offer additional facts that demonstrate how this job fulfills your needs in ways previous jobs did not. However, as with all job-hunting problems, your time is short, since there are probably other qualified candidates.
