Okay, but if my resume is a concern let's talk about in the first interview. I can't exactly rest and vest for 2 years when the company is running out of money. I had the bad luck of this happening 3 times in a row.
Company A got their funding pulled and shut down. Company B, where I was actually at for about a year and a half, switched owners and shutdown my entire office. Company C merged into it's main competitor and effectively fired most of us.
I will admit I was at one fantastic job and after around 3 years I probably could of stayed indefinitely. But back then I didn't recognize the value of a solid job. If you land somewhere and you're well liked by people, and able to do quality work, you really should just stay there instead of chasing slightly more money.
It probably doesn't work like that tho - they don't know how much of a concern it is. And maybe CEO doesn't see resume until later in process, raises an objection.
That said, the general lack of emapthy from recruiting towards time invested and rejections is astonishing and seemingly cruel or emotionally negligent.
US corps are constrained I think by what they can reveal about denial reasons because they don't want to get sued for discrimination.
That said, it can often feel like, you were kept in the pool as an alt/negotiating foil if they didn't get their first pick, or needed to say "we have another candidate willing to take $YOUR_ASK-$BIG_DELTA.
I think we should approach the hiring gauntlet not as "workshop to see what it's like to work with these folks" but as "battle where we can divine the worst about the people we might choose to work with", but still remain sunny and positive while cannily noting any weirdness.
Hope that helps! :)
After my dates of employment I will parethetically add (bankrupt) or (shutdown) to indicate that it wasn't related to me personally. My best job was 18 months.
Yeah I had a manager grill me like crazy about short stints on my resume while I was interviewing for DigitalOcean. He told me it looked like I wasn't dedicated or trustworthy.
He wasn't my manager so I brushed over it and 6 months into working at DO they started 3 rounds of enormous layoffs that were handled so poorly even the executives doing the layoffs got removed by the board.
So I left and got to add another short stint at a company run by craven morons to my resume :)
I was laid off at my last 3 positions and can really relate to this. If it’s any consolation: how a company handles this is a good indication of the maturity of their management and recruiting function. I also strongly disagree with any assertion that would state “short stints = unreliable employee”. Nobody can make that assertion without confirmation of what caused those stints and the tech market from 2020 - today has been notoriously volatile.
There are plenty of great orgs out there that will soak with you before making assumptions, but as a rule most startups have fairly inexperienced management unless they are founded by a team that’s been through the rodeo a few times.