How to handle the question when asked what is my motivation of switching my job

In general, experienced technical managers who are decent at recruiting:

• Know that young folks in their 20s are more prone to "job hopping" than others. It is natural that you want to try out a lot of different things early on in your career, to find what you enjoy the most. Whereas people in their 30s or later are more often settled down, perhaps forming a family or having bought a new home etc.

• Do not expect you to care about business and finances other than if you are given a budget for a specific project. Every single engineer/developer I have ever encountered were, to a man, completely uninterested in the business side of the company. They just want to work with technology and development.

But if you are still job-hopping after your 3-4 first jobs, that looks bad in your CV and the recruiters will ask about that. Particularly if you are in your 30s or older - then job-hopping is known as a method used to increase one's salary and that usually doesn't sit well with any employer.

From your comment:

They are based in Oslo, and recruiting for that location. So they told me if they would handle the visa processes and all for me, they would expect me to stay longer. And honestly speaking, 1.5-2 years in IT industry seems ok to most of the people. I see they raised this question seems they find it odd in my case. They said they see some kind of pattern here.

There are some a cultural aspects here. Scandinavia (I'm from Sweden) has very strong employment laws and unions - employers can't just fire someone because they feel like it. One month of mutual notice period minimum is regulated by law, though sometimes there are union deals giving much longer notice periods, depending on how long you have worked etc. There are also laws ensuring that "first in, last to go" that have to be respected in case of down-sizing.

All of this in turn means that employees are switching jobs far less frequently than in other countries with weaker employment laws. Which in turn means that job-hopping is even more frowned upon in Scandinavia than in other countries, because it isn't the norm.

Fixing visa, work permits etc also means lots of bureaucracy for the employer, so they will naturally rather prefer to avoid that unless they think you are in it for the long term.

The process of recruiting, interviewing, hiring and on-boarding a new employee can be costly. Employers hope to get a reasonable return on that investment. If the new hire leaves in a short time and the company has to repeat that process all over again, that will not be very cost effective. Employers ask these questions during the interview phases to guard against this.

When answering these questions, you need to be honest and speak in positive terms. You shouldn't express or linger on the negatives of your previous jobs or employers.

Companies understand that things happen and sometimes you land in a bad fit or something changes with the former employer situation, honest answers about these scenarios should not be a red flag. However, when there is a candidate with a repeated history of leaving jobs in 2 years or less, for example, why would the employer expect that the candidate will last any longer for them. That goes strongly against the ROI concerns they have about the hiring process.

I would say the correct approach to such a situation would be to tactfully tell the truth but not fall into the trap of slandering your previous employer. People leave jobs for being under-valued, under-paid and exploited every day, but this is a test to see how you handle talk about your previous employer. Don't get emotional and even if there are a lot of things you could say rather don't say them even if all those grievances you have are real.

They really want to know if the work relationship sours if you are going to slag them off when you leave also.