Job-hopping is defined as spending less than two years in a position. Right now, it is on the rise as millennials saw what happened to parents and parents’ friends during the 2008 Great Recession as companies laid-off workers. The Great Recession made millennials less eager to work for a company for 20 to 30 years. While many people job-hop to get out of negative situations, they fail to step back and ask essential career questions. As the trend of job-hopping has continued to rise, people don’t realize how negatively it affects their career paths.

It takes an average employee six months to be fully up and running in their new position, and hiring managers need to know they will be around longer than another few months before moving on. Too many people get dissatisfied when the learning phase is over, and it becomes “just a job.” Before writing resignation letters, workers need to know the other side of the story as job-hopping can cast an employee in an unfavorable light.

Anything less than one year at a job may raise red flags with new employers. Staying less than a year may leave the visual that a candidate is moving to different positions for salary alone. Even if it’s not true, this is problematic because employers assume the worker will move on again after finding a more lucrative job. Regardless of how qualified an applicant appears; why should employers invest their time to train, just for the employee to leave shortly after and start the process over?

Job-hopping may help people quickly build up skills; it doesn’t provide time to develop a track record. A resume is the story of a worker’s career. Going from industry to industry is ok, but there need to be solid reasons why and how it benefits you professionally. Job-hopping can lead to a non-cohesive story, and there won’t be anything to further a career. A weak resume can lead to a job with the same position and the same responsibilities over and over.

While job-hopping may lead workers to meet several new people, these new connections may only be on the surface, with nothing underneath. Continuously moving from job to job makes to challenging to develop real relationships with colleagues, which hinders their ability to create a reliable career network. Instead, job-hopping can compromise the potential for developing reliable contacts to vouch for an employee’s talents.

Spending less than two years at a job can be detrimental to a career. While Job-hopping is becoming a trend amongst millennials, it comes with many downsides. Whether it’s leaving right after getting accustomed to a new job, raising red flags, ruining future careers, or making it difficult to build career networks, job-hopping is a bad business trend.