Six jobs in six years is a dataset, not a defect

There is a kind of candidate every screening process quietly bins: six roles, six years, never anywhere long enough to be promoted. The timeline reads as a warning. Ask the person, though, and a different pattern appears. Each move had a reason. The role was missold. The project was cancelled. The manager who hired them left in month two. They kept choosing to leave situations that were not working, which is also a description of judgement.

Some frequent movers are genuinely restless, and restlessness has costs. But the CV cannot distinguish the restless from the repeatedly missold, so it convicts both. A timeline shows that you moved. It cannot show what you walked into, what you shipped before you left, or what you learned about your own conditions for doing good work. Six jobs produce more information about a person than one job does. The format throws that information away and keeps only the count.

What six roles actually produce

A person who has onboarded six times is an onboarding expert. They have seen six codebases, six team cultures, six ways a company does the same thing, five of them badly. The pattern-matching this builds is precisely what small companies say they want when they ask for people who hit the ground running. The irony is structural: the experience that builds the capability is the experience the screen rejects.

Count the work, not the moves

On an evidence-first profile, six short roles become what they produced: the migration finished in month three, the process documented before leaving, the tool still in use after its builder moved on. Published work from each stop, tagged with what it proves. A company searching capabilities sees the accumulation. The move count is visible, in the background section, in your own words, where it reads as what it is: a history, not a verdict.

We think the market for people like this is mispriced, which for a hiring company is another word for opportunity.