Nobody mentions the last three.
You get the offer. You get the welcome email with the seating plan and the laptop collection slot. What you never get is the one sentence which matters: "The three people who sat here before you left in pieces, and two of them are still not right."
So you arrive early. You stay late. You work out on your own why the job feels heavier than the advert. By month four you are eating lunch at your desk. By month nine your partner asks whether you have noticed how you talk about work now.
You are not failing. You are the fourth person in a chair which breaks people.
Every chair has a history. Companies hide it.
When a role opens three times in five years, the hiring manager has three separate stories ready. One relocated. One had a baby. One was a poor fit for the culture.
Three stories, three excuses, and no line drawn between them.
Draw the line yourself. Three people did the same work under the same constraints, with the same stakeholders and the same impossible ask, and each of them stopped. The common factor is not the three people. It's the seat.
Kelly Swingler, who works with burnt out HR leaders for a living, puts the question about as bluntly as it goes: what would you do if you found out you were the fourth person to burn out in your job? I keep coming back to it, because most of us never even ask the question. We assume the previous occupant was weak, or disorganised, or unlucky. We assume we will handle it better.
We assume wrong, and then we blame ourselves for the result.
The World Health Organisation stopped calling it a personal failing in 2019
This is the part which took me too long to understand.
The WHO classifies burn-out as an "occupational phenomenon" rather than a medical condition. Their words. It sits in the chapter about factors influencing health status, and they define it as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress which has not been successfully managed.
Read the end of the sentence again. Not stress which the employee failed to cope with. Stress which has not been managed... by the workplace.
The three dimensions they list are "feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion", mental distance and cynicism about the job, and "reduced professional efficacy". Every symptom sits inside the person. Every cause sits outside them.
Four of the five biggest causes belong to the boss
Gallup studied nearly 7,500 full-time employees and found 23 percent reported burnout at the top end of the scale, always or close to it, with another 44 percent feeling it sometimes. Two thirds of the workforce, on a spectrum from singed to charred.
Then they listed the top five causes:
- Unfair treatment at work
- Unmanageable workload
- Lack of role clarity
- Lack of communication and support from the manager
- Unreasonable time pressure
Look at the list as a manager. Number one is yours. Number two is yours. Numbers three, four and five are yours. Not one of them says "insufficient resilience" or "poor personal boundaries" or "did no yoga".
Gallup also found burned out employees are 2.6 times as likely to be hunting for another job, 63 percent more likely to take a sick day, and 23 percent more likely to end up in the emergency room. The bill arrives whether you look at it or not.
Jennifer Moss made the same argument in Harvard Business Review: burnout is about your workplace, not your people. Free fruit and a mindfulness app do nothing about an unmanageable workload. They tell the fourth person the problem is their breathing.
The interview question I ask now
"Why is this role open?"
Then, whatever the answer, I ask the follow-up. "And the person before them?" And then, "and the one before them?"
Three questions. Watch what happens in the pause after the third one. A healthy company answers with dates and names and a shrug, because people move on and nothing sinister happened. A chair with a history produces a different sound... a small laugh, a glance at the other interviewer, and a sentence beginning "to be fair, it's been an intense couple of years."
There is your answer. Take the job with your eyes open or leave it, but stop letting them hand you a warm seat and call it an opportunity.
I handed someone a broken seat once
I hate writing this bit.
I once had a role on my team which chewed through two good people. Both left within a year. I ran the same routine everybody runs. First one wasn't organised enough. Second one struggled with ambiguity. I wrote a slightly better job description, I told myself I would support the next person properly, and I hired again.
I changed the person three times. I never changed the job.
The work was the problem. One human sat between four teams with no authority over any of them, an on-call rota, and a stakeholder who treated every request as an emergency. I knew all of it. I had normalised all of it, because I had been carrying half of it myself before the role existed.
My research into bad bosses found 99.5 percent of survey respondents reported one or more types of bad boss in their working life. I used to read the number as a fact about other managers.
If you are already in the chair
Five things, in order.
Write the job down. Not the description. The real list. Every meeting, every rota, every "quick favour" nobody counts. Put a time cost next to each line. The page is the evidence, and evidence beats the feeling of being unable to cope.
Name the pattern once, in writing. "I'm the fourth person in this role in four years. What changed after the last three?" Send it. Their reply tells you everything about the next two years of your life.
Set one boundary and hold it in public. One. A hard stop, a protected morning, a rota you come off. Held visibly, so the team sees it hold. Private boundaries get quietly renegotiated at 6pm on a Thursday.
Give it a date. Ninety days. If nothing structural has shifted by then, the answer is not more effort. Write the date in your calendar now, while you still have the judgement to set it.
Find the person before you. LinkedIn works fine. Buy them a coffee and ask what broke them. Most people will tell you, because nobody ever asked them at the time.
If you are the boss, count the chairs
Open your HR system. Sort every role by how many people have held it in five years.
Any seat with three names in it is not a hiring problem. It's a design fault, and it belongs to you.
Then go and read the exit interviews for those three. Not the summary. The actual words. And ask what changed after each one... which, in my experience, is a short and embarrassing list.
The fourth person is walking through your door on Monday, full of energy, ready to prove they are made of stronger stuff.
What are you sending them into?