By Jeff Westover

Heidi Rawlings looked over the resume before her and shook her head.

In her 13 years as a regional manager she can't remember a time when job seekers showed so many job changes on applications and resumes for available positions with her company.

"They used to tell us that a person with so many job changes was someone to worry about." Heidi said. "But recently, our HR department ran us through an interviewing exercise to teach us how to tell the difference between a good job hopper and a bad one."

In these days of explosive change and opportunity in the workforce, job-hopping is not necessarily the warning signal it once was to a hiring manager.

~ Churn, Baby, Churn ~

The U.S. Department of Labor reports that "job churn"- or the number of people who voluntarily leave their jobs - grew at a rate of nearly 14 percent a year in the 1990s. This rate is more than double that of the previous decade.

In the classic definition of career counseling, those job seekers that pursue a career path of regular job change are setting themselves up for failure in their attempt to climb the career ladder. But a number of factors have surfaced over the past decade that appears to be changing that opinion. In some cases, job-hopping promotes the perceived craftiness and business savvy of those jobseekers who have managed their career moves well.

Rawlings tells the story of a recent new hire with a history of job changes-and why she had to hire her.

"She spoke the language of our performance management program." Heidi explains. "In the interview, she told of a time with her previous employer where she was charged with the responsibility of the profit-and-loss performance of a location. And she showed how she succeeded - on paper. It doesn't matter to me that she was with them for only two years. She clearly had the expertise we require and we feel darn lucky to have her."

Heidi's experience with this new hire is curious in one other respect. As the job offer was tendered to the candidate, the negotiations included a frank discussion about how long the new hire anticipated being employed in order to meet her goals. Her objective is to be qualified for an elevated position similar to Heidi's within 3 years. The job candidate insisted and received in writing a commitment from her new employer on a performance plan in order to meet that objective. And if the company cannot place her within their own ranks at the next level of responsibility, they have committed to pay for career placement services to help her obtain it somewhere else.

Job-hopping doesn't have to make a job seeker look dumb. In the case of this job candidate now working for Heidi, she is dumb like a fox.

-- Jeff Westover is a writer based in Salt Lake City, Utah with over 15 years of business, personnel and human resource management experience. Jeff can be reached at jeff@westovernet.com