Does longevity at a company count these days, especially when you’re looking for a new job or are employers glossing over time spent at one job and looking only for skills instead?

“It depends on the job,” says Tina Boswell, a career adviser and former analyst with the U.S. Department of Labor. “Companies often claim they base personnel decisions on a variety of areas, but every hiring decision or employee-retention decision usually comes down to dollars. If you prove you’re worth what you want in salary or if that potential employer feels like you can add to the bottom line — or in some cases, not take away from it — your tenure with one company won’t matter as much as what you did there, what you accomplished there and how you can use the skills to help them.”

Resume writer Susan Cora agrees, saying employees with years of experience at one company can use that advantage. “It’s costly to train employees, so bringing in someone with a resume that includes six jobs in five years is a risk. Hiring someone who sees the value in a long-term work relationship can help companies with stability.”

Boswell says most new companies look to hire employees who can prove their stability and their potential. “There’s an expectation that start-ups hire the best and the brightest but with those hirings comes another expectation — that they’ll move on to the next start-up within a year,” she says.

To help alleviate concerns that new hires will be moving on to the Next Best Thing at the first opportunity, Boswell says employees applying for the job should include their enthusiasm for maintaining growth at a company and building it from the ground up.

Some long-term employees are genuinely shocked when their employer tells them they’re no longer necessary. “Nineteen years, one job and one company,” says Oliver Thompson.

Thompson, 48, says he worked as an account manager for a fitness equipment company for nearly two decades. “It was my first job out of school and all of a sudden it was like my work meant nothing,” he says. “I never really put together a resume or even thought about looking for another job because I really liked what I did and the people I worked with.”

Like many long-time employees, Thompson found himself on the wrong side of the balance sheet. “I was a casualty of consolidation,” he says. “There were people in another office doing what I did and they were doing it for much less money.”

Thompson says he was pleasantly surprised to hear from potential employers but it took a significant revision to his resume to get the ball rolling. “My first resume was a bust because it was all about my experience and what I had accomplished,” he says. “Luckily, my severance included five sessions with a career coach and the first thing she did was tell me my resume was total crap.”

One quick fix meant Thompson’s top-of-the-resume summary of his skills was revised to focus on his value to his potential employers, not vaguely dwell on previous accomplishments.

Thompson says several employers took notice, and after interviewing with a few of them, he took a new job with a company that was a direct competitor to my previous company.

Tribune News Service