Quitting with little or no notice given
We’ve already spoken about a few issues related to resigning like writing a resignation letter and also the fear of resigning and leaving your current employer.
But another issue that often pops up related to the resignation process is something that can occur even before you’ve got a job offer in hand, something that can hurt you if and when it happens.
It’s when you indicate to a hiring manager or recruiter that you can immediately leave your current job and start a new one right away. The issue is of course is that if you’re working currently, chances are that you have some sort of notice period that you have to give. It’s probably 2 weeks minimum and might be as high as 3-4 weeks in some cases.
So when you are in an interview and show your enthusiasm for a job and suggest that you can quit your current job right away, an alarm bell usually goes off in the head of the interviewer because they basically hear that you’re going to leave your current employer in the lurch and quit suddenly without notice.
Then they wonder how long it will be before you do the same thing to do.
Contractors – people who work on contract jobs – can be notorious for this. If a person has been working on contract for many years, they get used to a process whereby they start looking for a contract before their current one has ended so they can (when possible) leave one contract on a Friday and start a new one on Monday and avoid being unemployed for any length of time.
Typically though, they experience things along the way that cause them grief like when they are verbally promised that a contract will get extended so they don’t bother looking for a new job and then the extension never materializes and they’re out of a job.
Or when they are told their contract is ending so they reluctantly look for a new job and get one and are then told by their current employer that their contract can be extended after all so they’re stuck trying to figure out how to either get out of the new contract they just signed or let their current employer know that they can’t accept the contract extension because they’ve signed a new one elsewhere.
So while contractors have to deal with stuff like this, hiring managers do too and if they’ve been burned by someone leaving a contract or full time job with little or no notice given they typically don’t want to get burned again. In other cases, the hiring manager has made a mistake by telling an employee that they aren’t needed anymore and then lose the employee to another company and then realize they still need this person but it’s too late to retain the person since they’ve been hired elsewhere.
When this hiring manager hears you telling them that you plan on leaving your current job right away and can start with their company immediately with no notice given, they probably start thinking about the situations like the ones mentioned above and fear that when you inevitably decide to leave their employment at some point in the future, you’ll do the same to them.
I’ve spoken with hiring managers on several occasions who have told me that they’ve had problems with various staff members leaving them in the lurch and quitting without giving notice and how this hurt them. This especially hurts on projects and other time sensitive jobs where suddenly losing a key team member can cause costly delays.
Typically, they consider that employees who leave a job without giving notice have little tact or professionalism. When you make it look like you plan on quitting your current employer by giving little or no notice, you tend to give them the same impression of you.
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