Why you have stayed in your current job for long time ?
Reason for asking this question is:
- The interviewer is checking whether they might be able to unearth some of the bad reasons.
- Their main concern will most likely be that you might have become set in your ways as a result of staying too long with one organization and will struggle to cope with and adapt to new challenges.
While answering this question you can say like:
- “Yes, I preferred to stay with them all this while because -
- I was regularly adding value to my experience and I was growing as a professional”.
- People in my office were friendly and the work atmosphere was comfortable.
- My manager was extremely cooperative and understood my personal problems.
- I think that’s what made me stay there for a long time.
- In your answer what you must aim to achieve is to portray the fact that you stayed with that organization for "such a long time" as a positive thing, as a conscious decision you made.
- If you undertook more than one role within that organization, for example you gained promotion and moved up in the organization, then that's all you really need to say.
Sample answer:
- I choose to stay within that job because my work always remained an interesting challenge. Over the course of the decade, the company grew from a small outfit with just five employees to a much larger organisation with well over 50 employees. It changed so significantly that it didn't actually feel like I was necessarily working for the same organization. Clearly, the way an organization with just 5 employees operates is very different to the ways in which one with over 50 employees operates. While my actual job title may not have changed over the years, the actual nature of my work evolved and changed rapidly. The job I was doing when I left the company bore very little likeness to the job I first took when the company was just starting up. With each new year, I learned new and valuable skills and, from having been there from the beginning, I am fortunate enough to have gained very useful experience in every department, from finance through to marketing, including much experience which is directly relevant to the job for which I am now applying.