Absolutely. I had a stretch of consulting gigs for a couple years and I recently was denied an interview because they "didn't like the short periods of employment" even though they were specifically indicated as short term contract jobs!

▲

RealityVoid a day ago | parent [-]

I understand ever having done consulting is seen as a red flag now, so that might be more to blame.

▲

neilv a day ago | parent [-]

A recruiter gave me the terse feedback about "too long consulting" from one company.

(And it didn't fit any rational objection I could think of, if they'd actually looked at the resume, beyond triggering on a keyword.)

I think a root problem is that many companies are bad at hiring, and many of those get confidently bad at it. In institutional emergent behavior terms, as well as individual actor terms.

▲

caminante a day ago | parent [-]

> I think a root problem is that many companies are bad at hiring, and many of those get confidently bad at it.

Precisely. And who are we kidding? I know a lot of people that have performance objectives to grow $ or cut $. I don't know anyone who has a comp clawback for making bad hires.

Spending too long (vague) consulting for one company doesn't measure your competencies or value you bring to the team. I bet they just needed a reason to knock you out and shortlist the hiring manager's preferred candidate who they don't know personally, but know via close friend referral.

▲

neilv 8 hours ago | parent [-]

One of the hiring problems that companies face is they're now flooded with resumes. And the easiest thing to do is have many false-positive declines. That alone can explain lots of random declines.

This can also dovetail with illegal hiring discrimination: when there's an exec/manager who doesn't want to hire women, people with kids, people likely to feel pressure to have kids soon, military veterans, ethnic groups, religious groups, etc... it's really easy for those resumes to be among the ones quickly discarded, with or without pretext. It's plausibly deniable, because of all the random declines of good resumes.

	▲	caminante 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Based on the parent's confirmation, this is the implicit reason. They're screening job-hoppers as a "rule of thumb" that shrinks the candidate funnel at the cost of losing out on 100x programmers or 1-10x programmers that can commit to 2y. I don't get the cost-benefit other than time and a lack of need for 100x programmers.