你该在一份工作上呆多久？

    迈克尔•O•切齐的回答

    这取决于你从工作中学到了多少，以及这份工作对你的职业生涯有何助益。一般而言，你应该记住几个数字：8、18、48和72。

    8个月以内

    这是很糟糕的，除非你能找出客观的理由（例如一场大规模的公司行为）。这表明你没有通过6个月的评估或第一个绩效周期。你最好在履历中省略这份工作，将任何成就算入自由职业部分，或者即便包括了这份工作，也要指出这是基于具体项目的合同雇工，虽然对方提供了更多项目，但被你拒绝。没错，我建议你在简历中省略某些内容。有些东西太糟糕了，只能被抛弃，其中就包括低于8个月的工作。只要你没有编造自己的成就，这样的处理便不能算是欺诈和不道德的谎言。你没有试图误导人们对你的看法；你在清理自己的过去，帮助面试官避免因为你经历过的无关议题而浪费时间。

    有一种例外，你在第一年受到被媒体关注的裁员事件影响。未公布的小规模裁员（低于部门的5%）会被视为与绩效有关，你应该隐瞒这样的事实，但如果你受到众所周知的裁员（如工厂关闭）的影响，就没有必要感到难为情。比如，如果一份仅从事了7个月时间的工作，因为与绩效无关的大规模裁员而被迫结束，你最好在简历中列出，没有必要隐瞒。

    18个月

    这是社会公认的下限。这意味着你至少安然度过了一个评估周期——绩效评估通常应该按年进行，而且公司只会对工作满6个月的员工进行评估；这正是18个月这个数字的由来——你必须取得一定的成绩，才能留在这家公司那么长时间。如果有好的解释，比如公司行为（并购、管理层变动等）影响了你的工作性质，或者因为家庭因素，9个月也可以接受。

    如果因为某些原因工作时间不足18个月，只要你能证明自己经历过一次绩效评估，也会对求职有所帮助。（获得过一笔奖金或在一轮裁员后留了下来，就足够了。）尽管如此，这样的短期工作不能太多。如果你在一份工作中（可能是无意地）“被诱骗”，工作仅8个月就离职是可以理解的。但如果有五份工作均是如此，这似乎就是你的问题了。同样，如果你每一次离职都是因为工作性质变化，愤世嫉俗的人力资源部会对你产生怀疑。（我个人倒觉得对工作的这种挑剔令人钦佩，只可惜我不是规则制定者。）如果你说自己总是被骗（因为这很常见），人力资源部门会认为，你接受那些工作的时候没有合理预期。

    除非这份工作非常糟糕，否则你应该至少将这份工作做满15个月，跨越3个日历年（例如10月14日至1月16日），或者做满18个月，跨越2个日历年。我也不喜欢这些规则，不过许多公司非常不待见前一份工作只干了6至17个月的员工（不足6个月的工作可以不写入简历），因为他们无处可逃，但这就是现实。

    在其他方面相同的情况下，两年好于18个月，三年好于两年，四年好于三年。虽然多一个月所带来的优势并不值得你放弃显然更好的发展机会，但它却意味着你很好地避免了没有明显好处的跳槽行为。

    Answer by Michael O. Church

    It depends how much you’re learning and what the job is doing for your career. In general, the numbers you want to remember are 8, 18, 48 and 72.

    Under 8 months

    This is perceived to be terrible, unless you can point to an objective reason (such as a large corporate action). It suggests that you didn’t pass your 6-month review or the first performance cycle. You may want to omit the job and move any accomplishments to your freelance section, or include the job but say it was a project-specific contract role, and that you were offered more projects but declined. Yes I’m advocating that you omit something on your resume. Some things are so bad that you should drop them, and jobs under 8 months almost always qualify. As long as you don’t make accomplishments up, it’s not the deceptive and unethical type of lie. You’re not trying to mislead anyone about yourself; you’re cleaning your past to avoid wasting the interviewer’s time on irrelevant issues about things that have happened to you.

    One exception is if you’re affected by a news-making layoff in the first year, or ever. An unannounced small layoff (under 5% of your division) will be assumed to be performance-related and you should hide it, but when you’re affected by a known layoff (such as a plant closing) that everyone knows about, there’s no shame in it. With, say, a 7-month job that ended due to a large-scale, non-performance layoff you are better off to list it than hide it.

    18 months

    This is the socially accepted minimum. It suggests that you survived at least one review cycle — reviews are presumed to be annual, and people aren’t reviewed until 6 months old; that’s where the 18-month derivation comes from — and had to achieve something to be retained for that long. You can go down to 9 if you have a really good explanation, like a corporate action (i.e. merger, upper management change) that affected the nature of your work, or a family-related reason.

    If you come in under 18 months for some reason, it helps if you can establish that you did pass at least one performance review. (A bonus, or a round of layoffs that you survived, would suffice.) Even then, you can’t have too many of those, however. If you had one job where you were (possibly unintentionally) bait-and-switched and left at 8 months, that’s understandable. If you have five, it looks like the problem is you. Similarly, if you leave every time the nature of the work changes, HR cynics will be skeptical. (I see that as an admirable selectiveness in the work one does, but I don’t make the rules.) If your story is that you keep getting bait-and-switched (because it is, well, common) the HR cynics will think that you go into jobs with unreasonable expectations.

    Unless the job is terrible, you should try to make it span, at the minimum, 15 months spanning three calendar years (e.g. Oct. ’14 to Jan. ’16) or 18 months spanning two. I don’t like these rules, and a lot of companies abuse people during the 6 to 17-month spell (before the 6-month mark, the job can just be taken off the resume) because they are captive, but that’s how it is.

    All else being equal, two years is better than 18 months, and three years is better than two, and four is better than three. The advantage gained each month isn’t enough to merit passing up obviously superior opportunities, but it does mean that you’re best off to avoid movements that don’t have an obvious benefit.