How do you talk about leaving previous jobs in a way that’s honest but won’t harm your chances? Answering can be fraught with land mines
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. When you’re interviewing for a job, you’ll very likely have to explain your reasons for leaving a previous job or why you want to leave your current company. In theory, this question should be straightforward — we’re usually pretty clear in our own heads about why we want to move on — but in reality, answering can be fraught with land mines.
Your boss was a nightmare. Interviewers know there are plenty of terrible bosses around, and that you might be leaving a job because of one. The only problem is that interviewers don’t know you well enough to decide if your assessment of a terrible boss would line up with theirs. If you bad-mouth your old boss in a job interview, they’ll wonder what the other side of the story is, or whether you were really the problem.
You were laid off. If your job was eliminated — meaning you weren’t fired for performance reasons — you don’t need to beat around the bush. Layoffs are normal and not something you should feel any stigma about. You can be straightforward: “My company had to do layoffs and my position was one of the ones that was eliminated.”
People also are sometimes tempted to overexplain a firing, feeling they need to provide a long, detailed explanation of what happened. You don’t! Saying too much will make it a bigger deal than it needs to be, and generally you’ll come across as pretty defensive. Typically all you need are a few sentences explaining what happened. For example:
Plenty of people get fired from jobs and still go on to get hired again! The key will be in how you talk about it — ideally concisely, calmly, and without defensiveness. You didn’t like the work. It’s to your advantage to be straightforward about not liking the work itself, because it will help you screen out jobs that you might dislike for similar reasons. The key is to frame it in a positive way, where you also talk about what you do want to be doing. For example: “The role turned out to be largely marketing work, and I found that I really missed working more closely with scientists.
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