Why Did You Quit? 3 Professionals Share What Drove Them Away

Welcome to Recruiter QA, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Have a question you'd like to ask? Leave it in the comments, and you might just see it in the next installment of Recruiter QA!

Today's Question: What drove you to quit your last job – or any previous job? What mistakes do you hope your future employers never make?

1. I Was Frustrated by Modern Work Life

I quit my job in 2016 because I was largely fed up with the format of modern work life – the lack of flexibility, the lack of emphasis on positive work environments, and the failure of businesses to cultivate positive work cultures. This kind of mismanagement from company owners was so utterly debilitating, demoralizing, and depressing that it ultimately led me to quit my job as CEO and to quit the rat race altogether in order to change the way I live my life. I have now moved to a more entrepreneurial lifestyle in the hope (and expectation) of launching some exciting businesses of my own and doing things better!

— Thomas Smallwood, The Armchair Mountaineer

2. They Didn't Let Me Do the Job I Was Hired to Do

Once, I was hired to work at a multibillion-dollar company in an entry-level position. I was supposed to evaluate contracts and articles of association changes to reduce the chances of liabilities passing through. All was good so far. I was excited, and things seemed to be starting off on the right foot.

But then something ridiculous grasped my attention: I realized that 90 percent of the documents I was supposed to analyze were confidential, which means I didn't have the clearance to read them in full. This created the bizarre scenario of me reading parts of documents and approving the sections I'd read. This might sound okay, but it's not. You just can't fully understand certain things unless you read the whole of a document – especially when it comes to contracts. It was like verifying if a crate of potatoes was good by only looking at the ones on the top! This made me very uneasy and frustrated. I ended up leaving the company after a few months.

If I could ask one thing from my future employers, it's this: Please let me do the job you hired me for. I don't think that's asking too much.

— Yohan Varella, SlickPie

3. The CEO Never Bothered to Learn My Name

I was working at a small nonprofit. We had about 30 full-time staff members. I was one of probably 10 people who held a salaried position. We got a new CEO, and approximately 6 months into his time with the company, he still did not know my name. This was not the single reason I quit, but it made it even easier to leave

— Christina Oswald, Moncur