How do I explain frequent job changes?

What is actually being estimated

Nobody asks about frequent moves out of biographical curiosity. They are estimating a probability: how likely is it that this hire produces another advert in eighteen months. The estimate rests on two things you can influence in the room — the ratio of decisions you made to decisions made for you, and whether your moves point in one direction or in four.

That dictates the order of your answer. First the ratio: how many endings were contract expiries, how many were company decisions, how many were yours. Then the direction: what got bigger or narrower with each move. Only then, and only on request, the individual story. Start the other way round and you deliver four anecdotes while leaving the summary to be written by someone else.

The most common mistake is not dishonesty but symmetry. Equal airtime for every role feels fair, and it produces a stretch of speech with no emphasis, from which the listener picks out whatever stands out — which is always the shortest job. Unequal airtime is not a trick. It is the only shape in which a fragmented record can be listened to.

The market writes some of these short entries itself

A share of what you are being asked to explain was authored by the market, not by you. Of the adverts currently open on SwissJobs.app, 4.7 per cent state a time-limited form in their own text or in the employment type: a fixed-term contract, a temporary assignment through an agency, a cover arrangement, a seasonal post or an interim mandate. Those adverts create precisely the CV lines that later need a sentence, and they are distributed very unevenly across occupations.

The spread is wide enough to matter in the room. Nursing and care runs at 7.6 per cent, construction and fit-out at 6.3, logistics at 6.1 — while IT sits at 1.7 per cent. The same number of short roles therefore means different things in different places. In a care team, a run of cover contracts is a familiar shape. In an engineering team where time-limited adverts are rare, the same run needs one explanatory clause, because the person opposite has no equivalent in their own working life to map it onto.

Advert language separates the market even more sharply than occupation does. Among French-language adverts in our stock, 12.6 per cent name a time-limited form; among German-language adverts, 4.1 per cent; among English-language adverts, 3.6 per cent. If you built a career in Romandie and are now interviewing in Zurich or Zug, you are carrying a record that is ordinary where it was earned and unusual where it is being read. One clause fixes that: "the three assignments are Geneva cover contracts, which is the standard arrangement there."

One caveat belongs with those figures. We count the employment type plus the short description we hold for each advert, which covers roughly three quarters of the stock. A term that is absent means "not stated", not "ruled out". The percentages are good for orders of magnitude and for comparisons between fields; they are not a contract census of Switzerland.

In English-language hiring, the step is the story

International employers in Switzerland advertise in a noticeably different register, and it changes which version of your story lands. Across all open adverts, 12.4 per cent carry a level word in the title — senior, lead, head, principal, responsable — against 1.4 per cent carrying an entry-level word such as junior, trainee or graduate. Among English-language adverts specifically, the level word appears in 27.7 per cent of titles: more than one posting in four is explicitly a rung.

The contrast with the German-language stock is instructive. There, only 7.5 per cent of titles carry a level word, while 14.3 per cent of adverts promise a varied, wide-ranging job — a selling point that appears in just 1.4 per cent of English-language adverts. So the same career can be told two ways, and the market tells you which one it understands. In an English-language process, frame the moves as rungs: what each employer let you own that the previous one did not. In a German-language process, breadth is a word the market itself uses approvingly.

Level words are also unevenly spread by field, which decides whether the promotion explanation is available to you at all. A quarter of IT adverts carry one; hospitality is at 7.9 per cent, logistics 5.1, construction 4.6, retail 4.5, commercial roles 3.5, nursing and care 2.8. Where the market advertises rungs, changing employer is the ordinary way to take one, and "the next step was not open internally" is a complete answer. Where it does not, you need the other line: same occupation, harder cases, different setting, larger unit.

The half of the answer that belongs to the future

The worry in the room is never the move you made in 2023. It is the move you might make eighteen months from now, which is why the last sentence of your answer does more work than everything before it. It has to leave the pattern behind and point at this specific job, using a feature that appears in the advert and was missing from your previous roles.

To avoid sounding like a pledge, that sentence needs a checkable link rather than an adjective. Not "I am looking for something long-term", but: "In three of my four roles, receivables was a side task owned by someone whose real job was payables. Your advert lists it as a role with its own cover arrangement — that is the part that has been missing." One fact from your record, one fact from the posting, no declaration of intent.

Expect one of two follow-ups. "What was missing in each of the previous roles?" tests whether your explanation stays the same across all of them — inconsistency here is what actually costs you, not the number of moves. "How soon could you start?" is a good sign and needs a date rather than a feeling. Prepare both, because otherwise you improvise them at the exact moment your reserves are lowest.

The non-compete question, asked almost exclusively of movers

People who change employers often but stay inside one industry get a question others never hear: are you bound by a non-compete clause. Swiss law puts it in two articles worth reading once before the interview. Art. 340 para. 1 of the Code of Obligations requires the undertaking to be in writing and given by an employee with capacity to act. Para. 2 makes it binding only where the employment relationship "allows the employee to have knowledge of the employer's clientele or manufacturing and trade secrets and where the use of such knowledge might cause the employer substantial harm".

Art. 340a para. 1 adds the limits: the prohibition "must be appropriately restricted with regard to place, time and scope such that it does not unfairly compromise the employee's future economic activity; it may exceed three years only in special circumstances". Under para. 2 a court may cut back an excessive clause at its discretion. What that gives you in the room is not a legal opinion but a factual answer: whether a written clause exists in your contract, which territory and period it names, and whether it touches a clientele or a trade secret at all. The English text on Fedlex is a translation for information; the German, French and Italian versions are the binding ones.

Two things stay out of that answer. Do not assess whether the clause would hold — that is decided by a court in a dispute, not by a candidate in an interview. And never hint that you could bring client relationships with you. Offered as a strength, it is heard as a risk: someone who takes clients from one employer will take them from the next.

Three versions that actually come up

The assignment chain. Several roles through staffing agencies, each a few months. Version: "From 2023 to 2025 I worked through two agencies, continuously in warehousing with a forklift licence; every assignment ended with its contract, none with a dismissal. What I want now is a permanent post with an area of my own." Under Art. 334 para. 1 of the Code of Obligations a fixed-term employment relationship ends without notice — which is the factual basis for that version, and a good reason to keep the word "dismissal" out of it entirely.

Two short jobs back to back. Version: "Two roles in eighteen months, and I ended the second one during the probation period because the job was cut differently from what we had agreed. That was my decision and the only one of its kind in seven years." Saying explicitly that it is the exception replaces a judgement with a number, and spares the person opposite the work of turning two cases into a rule.

The restructuring run. Three moves, none voluntary, all driven by changes inside the business. Version: "Three moves, the same trigger each time: a site closed, a department was sold, a team was cut. The only decision that was mine was where I went next." Follow it immediately with the direction line, or the impression left behind is a sequence of accidents — and accidents do not reassure anyone who is pricing a risk.

All three share one build: a number, a recurring trigger, an explicit statement of which decisions were yours, and a closing sentence in the present. With those four parts in place, the details of any single role are only needed if someone asks.

The rehearsal

Write the summary sentence first and time it. It should come in under twenty seconds. Then build the list: one line per role, month to month, one word for the ending, one word for what grew there. The list is the answer, not a crib sheet — you will not read it out, but it is what keeps every role to the same length when you speak.

Next, put your reference letters beside it and compare start and end months with what you plan to say. Beyond four roles, a quarter-year drift is the standard error, and it surfaces later when the documents are checked. Speaking in the months that are written on the certificates costs nothing at the time and saves a correction when a correction is expensive.

Finally, say the three likeliest follow-ups out loud: "Which of these moves were your decision?", "What was missing each time?", "How long do you plan to stay this time?" The third has no number as an answer; it has a condition — what you will be watching for in this role to know it holds. Work that sentence out once, and you will not be improvising it in the room. That difference is audible.