I was doing my monthly poking around in Quora when I found the age-old question “How should I handle multiple job offers?” I started writing a response there but decided to keep it for ourselves, because I hit this scenario on virtually every position we work on, from exec to junior-level tech: a candidate starts looking for a job, gets a job offer, and wants to wait to make a decision until their other interviews/offers come through. Sometimes they think that will just be a few days: this person (who, to be fair, reads as somewhat new to the working world) wants a month.
Here’s what I tell every candidate who thinks this way: the job search process is not like the college admissions process, where every letter arrives at the same time. It’s easy to understand why you would want to wait until you had all the data and then give every company an answer on the same day, but that’s not how the real world works. You’re going to need to make decisions with limited information.
From the company’s perspective, letting you wait a month doesn’t make sense.
- In almost all cases, the company or the group you’re talking with doesn’t have unlimited headcount. They’re slating you for Job X. When you are holding Job X, they can’t put someone else in Job X, and Job X is not getting done. They need a decision. (Google’s the only exception in the software industry I know of here, since they hire for the company and place you later, at least at the individual contributor level.)
- It’s not in their best interest to give you a month. Yes, they know you’re asking for it to finish other interviews. Every company knows that you might be interviewing other places, but once they give you an offer, they don’t want you to have infinite time to consider every option, and they don’t want to be the oldest option in the book. They also don’t want to be part of a protracted negotiation for the “best” offer.
So you’re not going to get to investigate every single job offer you might get over an open-ended period. You’re going to have to make a decision. Accept, embrace, plan.
Also keep in mind that asking for more time is a negotiation point, and you might get that instead of something else with more long-term value (like salary). You can sometimes reverse this, as referenced in a previous post about negotiation, by making the trade explicit: “if you can pay me $5K more, I can decide now, else I need a few days.”
BTW, you probably can’t plan ahead on this, by scheduling your interviews in your assumed order of interest, because the followup steps won’t come together that cleanly.
(There was a time where career departments at top schools could keep companies from requiring candidates to make decisions by a certain day, but I have no idea if that’s still in vogue. Once you’re out of school, that world goes away.)
Big news today as our friends at TeachStreet were acquired by AmazonLocal. (Announcement here.)
TeachStreet started a few months before we did, and I’ve really enjoyed watching them try out different product ideas – but more importantly, I’ve seen them hire great engineering and product talent and mentor more junior folks to be future leaders in the Seattle startup community. Having TeachStreet on your resume is a badge of honor in this town. Dave Schappell‘s also been kind enough to refer great clients to us, and we’re lucky to have him in our corner.
AmazonLocal is chock-full of smart, experienced Amazon leaders, and adding this team to the mix (which has a lot of ex-Amazon blood in its veins already) will only help. Congrats to Dave, Daryn, Scott, and the rest of the group. On on!
In the last few weeks, we’ve had a number of candidates for permanent positions enter the negotiation phase – the client wants the candidate, and now they’re talking about terms. As a recruiting firm, we’re paid by the company; for our long-term success, we have to be helpful to both parties, be able to keep confidences as needed, and help them come to agreement.
We’ve been dealing with roles from $60K IT professionals, to $100K software developers, to two different $200K+ executive positions. In almost every case, we see the same pattern:
- Client offers the candidate a package: salary, stock, vacation, etc.
- Candidate wants movement on a range of different terms, and discusses those with the client (either through us or directly).
- Client goes back and starts seeing what she can do.
- Lather, rinse, repeat.
Nobody wants to be in this cycle. How do you get out of it?
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Happy New Year! I wanted to kick off 2012 (and end our December blogging hiatus) with a quick post continuing on a theme I started with The Power of Your First Question - setting the initial tone of a recruiting conversation at the level you want to be perceived.
We list a subset of the jobs we’re trying to fill at any one time from a link on our Careers page. We do this because those job descriptions get distributed to Indeed, Simply Hired, and other sources, and while there’s much more noise than signal, occasionally a great candidate finds us.
Every one of those jobs links to an application page: here’s the general one for an example. The application page is the same for each job – the idea is to make it easy for people to contact us – but there’s one question that requires thought: tell us “One interesting thing you’ve worked on recently.”
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We’re sponsoring our third Hacker News Seattle Meetup, tomorrow (Tuesday 12/13) at the Bookr offices in Fremont, a great space with excellent wallpaper and hipster photos. I’ve had fun at the first two, meeting a range of engineers and soon-to-be-engineers, reconnecting with old friends, and continuing to forget to bring business cards.
We’ll have a few folks from Rooster Park there, so please come find us! We’re still growing our consulting team, even in the lazy days of December.
Jimmy Recruiter just called you and told you about a job, and after you swallowed your annoyance and gotten through the obligatory BS, you’ve realized you might actually want the gig. If Jimmy’s with an agency (i.e. not an in-house recruiter), here are the four questions you should ask right away.
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December 2009: I call Poppy around 11:30am midweek to see if I can stop by to pick up a pile of gift certificates as thank-you gifts. (I do a mix each year – usually Canlis and one other.) Someone answers and says sure, so I park in a bus lane outside and walk in. Earbuds still in, looking at my iPhone, I mumble how many I need, ask what the right amount would be for a couple for two, and walk out with a pile of GC’s, distracted by something or other.
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I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately, and on Friday I did a power day, with six screens for the same position. (I do love it, but if you’re a great recruiter, I need your help.)
Each screen starts the same: an ice-breaking joke or two, then a monologue – 60-90 seconds about Rooster Park, 3-5 minutes about the job and the company. I pause just once to see if they are familiar with the company to inform the rest. At the end, I always say something like “that’s the overview. What else can I tell you?”
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if they all keep getting acquired.
Seriously, congratulations to our friends at Swype on their acquisition by Nuance.
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I’ve been a longtime reader and occasional contributor on Hacker News, YCombinator’s news aggregator, which focuses primarily on startup-friendly technical and business-oriented conversations, with occasionally-interesting diversions, and regular broadsides against horrific recruiting practices. (Here’s my profile, 778 days old as of today.) Most notably, I created a Google Spreadsheet of HN freelancers, which still has some life to it more than a year later.
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