A short tenure on a CV that ends in a company bankruptcy invites one question, and my answer is that I never saw it coming. I was sold stability and a growing market. Two weeks before the announcement we were told we’d lost a major client and that finances were fine. Eight months at a B2B eMobility company produced two product launches, a content library across eight segments, an SEO programme and a rebuilt social presence. This is what I built, why it still counts, and what I learned about due diligence.
I had the day off. I was at the vet with one of my cats when a Teams notification came through about an emergency general meeting. I watched the recording afterwards, which is how I learned the company was filing for bankruptcy.
I messaged my manager. He was in shock too, which tells you most of what you need to know about how much anyone below the top of that company saw it coming.
Two weeks earlier we’d been told we’d lost a major client, with the reassurance that the finances were stable. I had joined eight months before that on the strength of a stable company in a growing market, which is what I was sold and what I had no particular reason to doubt.
What I built in 8 months
Everything on my CV from that period was produced while I believed I was building for a company that would still be there in three years.
Two product launches, end to end, with every marketing material across web and social. Launch content accounted for 35% of total website traffic during the campaign windows, which is the number I’d keep if I could only keep one.
The content library: 12+ articles, 15+ web pages, two whitepapers and a case study, targeting eight eMobility segments (energy, charger manufacturers, charge point operators, fleets, mobility service providers, retail, vehicle manufacturers) across 39 countries. Blog content drove an 18% increase in organic traffic, and SEO across all eight segments moved priority keywords up an average of 12 positions.
40+ brand assets overhauled and the visual and tonal positioning rebuilt. Social owned end to end across three channels: 70+ posts in five months, impressions up 24%, reach up 217%. The detail of that one is in the social turnaround piece.
None of that is worth less for how it ended. A 217% reach increase happened. Keywords moved 12 positions. Those numbers describe what the work did, and the company’s balance sheet is a separate subject that marketing was never going to decide.
What due diligence can and can’t reach
The obvious lesson from a story like this is that I should have checked harder. I’ve heard that one and I’ve half believed it, and it doesn’t survive the detail that my own manager was as surprised as I was.
Here’s what I could have checked from outside: funding history and recency, headcount trend over 12 months instead of a snapshot, Glassdoor for restructuring signals, whether the founders were still there, how the company described its own runway. I now run all of that before accepting anything, and I’d recommend it to anyone. I also can’t tell you it would have caught this, because the information that mattered wasn’t public, wasn’t in a review, and wasn’t known to the people I’d have asked.
So the lesson is narrower and more useful than “do your homework”. Some company risk is genuinely unobservable from the candidate’s seat, and the correct response to unobservable risk is to stop treating a company’s survival as a reflection of your work, and to keep your own record as you go. When a company folds, the evidence of what you did can disappear with it: the site gets taken down, the analytics access ends, the people who could vouch for you scatter. Reconstructing it later from memory is a poor substitute for documenting it while it exists.
That’s most of why I now publish the reasoning behind my work instead of storing it in my own head. Fourteen years of freelance work taught me the same thing slowly, and I wrote that up in what freelance experience actually proves.
Why the work still counts
There’s a view that treats effort at a company that later fails as wasted, or worse, as evidence of poor judgement.
Two problems with that. The first is hindsight: the eight months weren’t lived under a shadow, they were lived as a normal job at a company I expected to be at for years, and the work was calibrated accordingly. Nobody makes different content decisions because of information they don’t have.
The second is that even where you can see it coming, coasting is the wrong answer. The work is the only part you control. Runway, funding, the client that walked, none of that moves because you tried harder, and the output does. The people watching you work through a difficult stretch are also the ones who write your references.
Nobody has ever been hired, promoted or remembered for how gracefully they coasted.
What I did take from it is a sharper read on the difference between work that matters and work that looks busy. Eight months is short enough that the filler is obvious in retrospect, and I can name exactly which pieces earned their place and which were made because the calendar had a gap.
How do you handle a short tenure on a CV without getting defensive?
Three of my last four companies went wrong somehow: one through a mass layoff, one through insolvency, another through restructuring. That’s the pattern a hiring manager sees before anything else, and the instinct is to explain it away.
Don’t. The context is ordinary. Carta data reported by TechCrunch shows 966 venture-backed US startups shut down in 2024, up 25.6% on the year before, and venture-backed bankruptcies in early 2024 ran at more than seven times the 2019 level. Harvard’s Shikhar Ghosh puts the share of venture-backed companies that never return cash to investors at around 75%. Failure now reaches funded, post-traction, well-staffed organisations, so a recruiter seeing a wound-down company assumes the market moved and not that you couldn’t execute.
The tenure norms have moved too. US median employee tenure was 4.1 years in 2024, and 2.7 years for workers aged 25 to 34, the lowest level in over two decades, and recruitment guidance now argues that tenure expectations should be calibrated to market norms rather than organisational preference.
How I handle it in practice:
- State the reason openly. My CV says “ended due to X” next to the dates. One line, no drama, and it defuses a short tenure on a CV before anyone forms a theory about it.
- Lead with what was built. Eight months produced launches, a content library, an SEO programme and a rebuilt social presence. That’s the substance of the entry, and the ending is a footnote to it.
- Don’t badmouth them. The company failed. Most of the people did good work in a situation they couldn’t see either, and describing it any other way tells an interviewer more about you than about them.
- Have the answer ready. Mine is three sentences: I didn’t know, my manager didn’t know, and here’s what we shipped anyway. That closes the topic faster than any careful framing.
The wider problem is that this puts the burden of proof on the candidate, who had almost no way to check the company’s health from outside in the first place. That asymmetry is the subject of what candidates can and can’t research, and a career break gets treated the same way, which I’ve covered in how to handle one on a CV.
What I’d do the same, and what I’d change
The same: all of the marketing. The prioritisation calls, building for the launches, keeping the standard where it was. Given those eight months again I’d produce the same list, and the prioritisation logic behind it is the one in my Content Prioritisation Framework.
What’s changed is everything around the work. I research companies properly now, with no illusion that it makes me safe. I keep my own documentation of what I built instead of trusting that the company’s systems will still be there to prove it. And I’ve stopped reading a company’s collapse as a verdict on the people inside it, including me, which took longer than it should have.
The cat was fine, incidentally. That’s the part of the day I’d have predicted least accurately if you’d asked me that morning which of those two situations would turn out badly.
Frequently asked questions
State the reason plainly beside the dates, in one neutral line such as “ended due to company bankruptcy”, then let the entry lead with what was built and what it produced. Explaining the failure isn’t the job of the CV, since shutdowns now reach funded, post-traction organisations and recruiters generally read market conditions and not individual performance. In the interview, the short answer works better than a careful one, including the version where you didn’t see it coming, which is the common case and not the embarrassing one.
Not reliably from the candidate’s seat. Funding history and recency, headcount trend over 12 months, restructuring signals in employee reviews, founder tenure and how a company describes its own runway are all worth checking and all worth doing before accepting a role. What they can’t reach is information that isn’t public, isn’t in a review, and often isn’t known to the people you’d ask inside the company. Treat the checks as risk-pricing, not protection.
No. Results describe what the work produced, and insolvency is driven by factors marketing rarely controls, including funding, client concentration, market timing and decisions taken well above the content function. The credibility question that matters is whether the numbers are stated accurately, with clear boundaries around what you owned and what someone else owned, which is a discipline worth applying to every entry on a CV rather than only the ones that ended badly.
