The Inside View

I was recently meeting with a client about a finance hire when one requirement came up almost immediately.

"We're really looking for someone with strong tenure on their CV."

It wasn't an unusual request. In fact, it's something we hear regularly. Long tenure is often associated with loyalty, commitment, resilience, and the ability to build meaningful stakeholder relationships over time. In many ways, it makes complete sense. Most leaders would rather hire someone who wants to build something than someone who is already planning their next move.

But as the conversation progressed, it raised an interesting question. Does tenure always mean what we think it means?

The Last Few Years Have Distorted Career Histories

One of the challenges with assessing tenure today is that the last five or six years have been anything but normal. Many professionals currently showing seven, eight, or even ten years with one employer lived through a period where changing jobs felt significantly riskier than it does today.

Covid disrupted hiring markets, created uncertainty across industries, and encouraged many people to prioritise stability. Career moves that may have happened naturally in other circumstances were delayed or abandoned altogether. As a result, some of the longer tenures we see today are partly a reflection of market conditions rather than a deliberate commitment to a single organisation.

That doesn't diminish the value of those candidates. It simply means that the tenure itself doesn't necessarily tell the full story.

Staying and Growing Are Not the Same Thing

One of the assumptions often attached to long tenure is that it reflects continuous development. Sometimes that's absolutely true. We've spoken to candidates who spent a decade with the same business while progressing through multiple promotions, leading significant projects, managing larger teams, and building broad commercial exposure across the organisation.

However, we've also met candidates who have spent a similar amount of time in one business with relatively little change in their responsibilities or scope. On paper, both individuals demonstrate stability. In reality, their career development looks very different.

The number of years is only one part of the equation. Understanding what happened during those years is often where the real insight lies.

The Other Side of the Coin

The opposite assumption can be equally misleading. Candidates who have moved every few years are sometimes viewed as a flight risk, but that isn't always the case.

Many strong finance professionals have built their careers through deliberate moves designed to increase responsibility and broaden capability. One move might provide leadership experience. Another might offer commercial exposure, transformation work, or a first opportunity to lead a team. Viewed individually, the tenures may appear shorter. Viewed collectively, they often reveal a highly intentional career path.

Movement doesn't always indicate a lack of loyalty. Sometimes it reflects ambition, adaptability, and a conscious effort to accelerate development.

What Hiring Managers Are Really Looking For

The more we discussed the brief, the clearer it became that the client wasn't actually looking for tenure itself. They were looking for what they believed tenure represented.

They wanted someone capable of building relationships, seeing initiatives through, navigating difficult periods, and becoming a long-term contributor to the business. Those qualities are valuable, particularly in finance where credibility and trust are often built over years rather than months.

The challenge is that tenure alone doesn't always prove those qualities exist. Likewise, shorter tenures don't automatically mean they don't.

That's why understanding the context behind a CV is becoming increasingly important.

Why Tenure Still Matters

None of this is an argument against long tenure. Far from it.

There is enormous value in people who have remained with a business through multiple cycles, developed deep institutional knowledge, and built strong stakeholder relationships. In many organisations, that experience can be difficult to replace.

The mistake is not valuing tenure. The mistake is treating it as a conclusion rather than a clue.

It can be a strong indicator of commitment and resilience. It can also be the result of timing, circumstance, opportunity, or market conditions. Without understanding the story, it's difficult to know which.

Final Thought

For years, tenure was viewed as one of the clearest indicators of candidate quality. Today's market is more nuanced than that.

Some professionals stayed because they were engaged, challenged, and progressing. Others stayed because uncertainty made moving less attractive. Some candidates moved frequently because they struggled to find the right fit. Others moved deliberately because each opportunity added a new layer to their experience.

Neither tenure nor movement is inherently positive or negative.

The best hiring decisions aren't made by counting years on a CV. They're made by understanding what those years actually represent.

Because tenure tells you how long somebody stayed.

The real insight comes from understanding why.