Staying five years too long is the real red flag on your CV

I spent twelve years as a QS before I moved into recruitment, and if I'm honest, at least two of those years were spent doing a job I had already mastered. I didn't leave because I was comfortable. I stayed because leaving felt like admitting the current run wasn't working, and because the next role hadn't announced itself yet.

Now I sit on the other side of the table, and I've lost count of how many CVs cross my desk with a six or seven year stint in one seat that reads, on paper, as loyalty. Loyalty is what the CV says. What the interview usually reveals is something closer to inertia: the same responsibilities, the same project types, the same conversations, repeated with diminishing variation year after year.

The plateau nobody flags

Here's the pattern I see most often. The first eighteen months in a role are genuine growth: new systems, new stakeholders, new scale of project. Then there's a plateau, usually somewhere between year two and year three, where the learning curve flattens and the job becomes maintenance. Some people notice the plateau and start building their exit before it costs them anything. Others don't notice, or notice and decide the risk of moving is worse than the cost of standing still. Five years later they're applying for commercial director roles with a CV that shows tenure but not trajectory, and they can't work out why the panel keeps hesitating.

The panel isn't hesitating over the length of the stint. It's hesitating because nothing in the CV or the conversation shows what changed in years three, four and five. If you can't answer "what did I learn in my fourth year that I didn't know in my second," that's the tell, not how long you stayed.

Not an argument for hopping

None of this is a case for job hopping. Two years in a role before moving on is a genuine concern for a different reason: nobody's had the chance to see you carry something through to completion, including the parts that go wrong. The skill isn't leaving early or staying late. It's noticing the plateau while you're still on the clock and deciding deliberately, either to widen the role from where you sit, take on the thing nobody wants, or start planning the next move, rather than letting the calendar make the decision for you.

If you've been in your current seat for three years or more, the useful question isn't "should I move." It's "what have I actually learned since the last anniversary that changed nothing." If you can't answer that in under a minute, you already have your answer.