It should start with the question that matters - why would anyone want to change. And while there could be many reasons that provide reasonable answers to it, most candidates don't distill it down to something that they can tell their interviewers or, the head-hunters who pose this question. I've sat through enough interview sessions where the candidate starts off hesitatingly with a reason and thereafter meanders into the safe territories of "trying to build my career", "looking for new opportunities" etc.

This is of course followed by the painful job of explaining to all and sundry, including the methods and systems you choose to locate a suitable job, about your expectations. This generally follows two trends - at your current set up it tends to veer towards a discussion of what could have been. At your probable future employers this leads to an up-sell of the brand, the processes and the workflows.

In the midst of all this, which is, by the way a very nervous time, you'll have a group of naysayers - friends, family and others, who would try and tell you how a bird in hand is worth than two in the bush. Never mind if the bird that you are apparently holding is way past its keep_alive date. And if all this was not enough you get the sadistic pleasure of looking back on your career, as if you wanted to do that in the first place, and then analyze in every possible detail what you gained out of each assignment and experience. You have to take time to figure all of this out because you'll be asked about it. And, you'll be asked to explain bits where sometimes you didn't have much control over the situation enough to undertake an informed call.

If you are doing all of this while being committed to the task at hand then it becomes double fun - you are always introspecting a moving target, refining and repolishing your own analysis and sometimes probably being unfair and unjust to yourself. All the time you are looking out and trying to figure if there's indeed something out there that catches your fancy and makes you wistfully long for it. Or, are you just going to do what you do now, and derive a lesser degree of joy from it.

Why is job hunting like this ? Why can't it be a better experience ?