"Why Did You Leave Your Last Job?"

Every time I interview a prospective employee, I love to ask the question “Why did you leave your last job?”  I learn a lot from the responses.

Leaving a job can be a difficult situation, one rife with political implications, challenges, and disappointments.  Someone who displays candor, honesty and class when answering this question will quickly move to the top of my list.  Someone who takes the opportunity to complain about what was wrong with everyone except them at their last job will quickly be crossed off of my list.

This article at CareerJournal tackles this tricky situation head on and offers some interesting tactics for answering this most telling of interview questions.

Comments

[gpaskill]

As an employer, I rarely found value in this question and no longer ask it, why someone left their previous job(s). It compounds today's underlying problem in hiring: too much focus on what people have done, not enough on what they can do.

Tons of job hunting books and Web sites show how to handle this question. So it's counterproductive to attempt to differentiate between a candidate who speaks from the heart and one who's been coached.

Marcus Buckingham's books state the #1 reason most people leave their jobs is because of their boss. However, it is still ill-advised to badmouth former supervisors.

Some have observed that there's the job interview and then there's real life. With both some of my closest friends and casual acquaintances, it's incredible to note the discrepancy between what they told the employer (and got hired!) and what really happened such as a divorce, medical condition, transfer to an undesirable location, etc. Therefore, I delegate to Paul Harvey the task of "the rest of the story."

Meanwhile, just like those 101 Interview Questions book show turnarounds, so do I. What I do ask candidates is "Why do you want to work for us?"

And when I've been confronted by the "why did you leave your last job," I ask in return "Which do you prefer, a story that gives some of the acceptable answers for leaving a job, or my reasons for choosing you?" Some employers appreciate this polite prod about the limited gift of time we have, to redirect attention from what I did for someone else towards what I can do for them. That's why the time we as employer and candidate work together is called the present.

And that focus on the present and future is something candidates say they want from more of my fellow employers.

[Hunter Arnold]

Gpaskill,

Thanks for your insightful comments. I think you've made some excellent (not to mention accurate) points. I particularly appreciated your suggestion that people should ask "why do you want to work for us"...a question that should be posed in every interview. In truth, I actually agree with everything you've said, which means I also did an incomplete job of communicating why I like the "Why did you leave your last job" question. Serves me right for trying to squeeze in short entries!

While I agree completely that most applicants are trained to answer "Why did you leave your last job?" as apolitically as possible, what I didn't explain is that what I often look for is someone who doesn't answer it typically.

I agree that the "from the book" answer neither makes a candidate a good or bad fit, and it fact when you get the pad response you undoubtedly need to probe deeper. However, getting a non-traditional answer can be worth it's weight in gold.

You mentioned the importance of not bad-mouthing an ex-boss, and Buckingham's assertion that this is why most people actually leave jobs. When you ask "Why did you leave your last job?" though, it's not infrequent for people to ignore what seems like common sense and launch into a tirade about there terrible boss or horrid co-workers. When this occurs, I think you just got lobbed a softball. You should never hire this person! In this case asking "Why did you leave your last job?" just made your decision really easy.

Similarly, but more a matter of my personal taste, when someone answers the question with brutal self-effacing honesty, I will almost undoubtedly give them a shot. I recently had a candidate tell me that he left his last job because he "was an idiot" and let himself get dragged down by the negatives. He confided that in retrospect it was a great company and that he wished he had realized that "a year ago" before he started checking out mentally. Some people might view this statement as a warning sign, but to me it indicated an ability to self-reflect, take responsibility and, hopefully, evolve. Again, it wasn't the out-of-the-box answer, but it helped me get to know the candidate.

All of that said, I agree that "Why did you leave your last job?" can be a dual-edged sword, but for me the few custom responses make it worth putting up with the dozens that are just going through the motions.