Unable to close the deal
Hello everyone. Posted a few week ago about a verbal offer I received on 4/6/07. The company in question had to do reference checks & education verification before making a final offer. All of this was completed as of 4/12/07. I spent the next few days trying to track the hiring manager down without much luck. Finally, I was able to contact her and she said she was slammed with end of quarter work and would get back to me last friday 4/20/07. By Friday COB, I wondered what had happened since it had just hit the 2 week mark from the verbal offer and still nothing in writing and she didn't call me back. Best solution?????????? Go silent and start looking elsewhere. Problem is that one of my other job opportunities was within the same company but different division. Due to company policy, when Party A wanted to hire me, Party B was required to back off. However, I went back to Party B and tried to set up an interview as Party A seem to be stringing me along. Party A of course found out and is upset and described me as "impatient". I have been very professional and polite to all parties involved. However, without anything in writing, what smart candidate wouldn't look at all possibilities? Seem this particular employer has unrealistic expectations about potential job candidates? Wouldn't you keep looking for other opportunities 17 days after a verbal offer without an official offer letter? I guess what it really boils down to is that I might not accept the offer anyways as the employer really has me questioning bad business practices. Good news is that I have a good job still and can afford to accept/deny offers. Thanks for any input provided!!! "she said she was slammed with end of quarter work and would get back to me last friday 4/20/07. " Honestly, I do think you are "impatient." She said she'd get back to you by last Friday, but you also knew she was slammed with EOQ work. It's only Monday--not an unreasonable amount of time for somebody who already told you she was overloaded with work to have been delayed in getting back to you. Do you really expect her to drop her reports and whatnot in the middle to call you? Yeah, if she had time it would have been nice for her to have dropped you a quick e-mail or phone call to say she was still buried, but yes, you still will get the offer, and to hang tight. But, for you to go back to Party B immediately without calling Party A first out of courtesy was, given the apparent protocol in this company, rude & impatient. This woman is a hiring manager, apparently not an HR manager, right? It means she has a full-time job whose priorities are not interviewing & hiring staff. She has to do that on top of her f/t workload. I sometimes think that job seekers do not realize that a hiring mgr has to fit the hiring process in with a 40, 50, or 60-hour a week job.... Give her a break. You should have at least called her on Friday, or waited until today to call her and ask if the job offer was still on the table. If, at that point, she hemmed & hawed or put you off, then you could have asked her if it would be OK to approach Party B. This scenario does not reflect bad business practices. It reflects that this manager has her hands full with end-of-quarter responsibilities, which out of necessity have to come before getting a written offer letter out to you. It's reality, nothing more, nothing less. Frankly, I think you have been too impatient. With no disrespect intended, finalizing your job offer probably isn't the only thing these people have to do during the course of the day - for all you know a dozen unforeseen problems have come up that require their immediate attention. I appreciate how important this is to you, but it may not be on the top of their priority list. In many instances, it's not unusual for the completion of negotiations and the final delivery of an offer letter, assuming that's the way these people do it, to take a couple of months! Although you can choose to ignore this advice, you need to be nothing more than politely persistent with this employer. After all, the hiring manager told you she was "slammed" with quarterly stuff to complete. At the very least, that's probably pushed the completion of your paperwork to the back burner. If you're not careful, your impatience could cost this job opportunity. Paul W. Barada The Negotiation Expert I suppose I should also mention the following.
1. She really left me in the dark and I only found out about the delays due to persistance. Without that, I would still be wondering why I never heard back. 2. The company has an HR dept to handle this process. I know because my girlfriend works in the HR dept at a different location for the same company. She mentioned that this time frame is well beyond company expectations. 3. The hiring manager nixxed another job interview claiming she wanted to hire me. If the job offer isn't coming, I need to set up an interview for the other job before it fills? Everyone is super busy with work. However, still seems beyond a reasonable expectation to wait so long to get something in writing. You are definitely going to screw this up if you keep expecting them to live up to YOUR notion of timeliness! Unanticipated delays happen! Paul W. Barada The Negotiation Expert
You are probably correct. However, I have not been in contact with the hiring manager much at all in the past 5 days other than a brief email to explain why I was looking at other jobs within the company. The only thing she has witnessed is my active pursuit of another job opportunity. While I was in sales, I was always taught to generate a large number of leads to enable the closing of enough sales to meet the quota. Doesn't the same go for job seaches? Until a deal is closed, why should any candidate stop looking for other jobs ever? I never did push the hiring manager for an answer other than a friendly status check. A verbal offer is great but really isn't a good reason to hang up the boots and stop searching. I understand that unexpected delays happen. However, why sit and wait for one opportunity to pan out when a million others are waiting? :) I suppose that the best news of all this is that I am currently not in a desperate situation of needing a job or my approach would have to be alot different. Nobody said you shouldn't still be looking at other opportunities until you have accepted this particular offer. However, look elsewhere and quietly--it shows incredibly poor form to go back and contact another division in the same company that had already been told to back off. Don't you see how tactless and unprofessional that looks? Yes, I understand you want a new job and that you do not feel you have a firm deal in hand. But to, on the very day the hiring manager had said she expected to be back in touch with your, approach this other division--is in poor taste. And Paul is right--the timeframe you have been dealing with is not at all unusual--you're counting from the day of your interview--you should probably be "counting" from the day on which all the background/reference checks were finalized and the results forwarded to the hiring manager. You are still in the same month in which you interviewed--that is not at all a long process (hell, my husband was in line for a job that he was promised in December, and finally started in July the following year--it was a new position, and though he was "the" candidate, the job had to go through the corporate process first). Being in sales, yes, you need to be assertive--but not impatient and rude. You need to look beyond your own needs/wants to those of others around you, understand those needs, and do your best to meet them. THAT is what makes a good salesperson, not the ability to "push" people before they are ready to do something. I don't understand why you don't see that going back to another division of this company was an incredibly poor move in this case. The other division is not going to hire you. You're "spoken for". If the first job falls through completely, the second one may or may not consider you, but there's no way they're going to compete with a colleage for you. Now that you've annoyed the hiring manager in Job A, you should be looking for other opportunities elsewhere. Chances are very high that you've blown this in Job A and if that's the case, Job B isn't going to touch you with a ten foot pole. There's persistant, and there's pushy. You've crossed to pushy. You have come off as impatient and if it were me, I'd wonder about your good judgement and ability to edit yourself. Tess
I guess I will have to live with the consequences of not getting job A. However, job B is bringing me in for an interview this week and has been very curious and baffled at why job A was not reacting in a timely manner. In particular, the job is for a project controller that has a top secret clearance. Demand > Supply in this area for candidates to fill those positions and most of the govt. contractors in this area don't let qualified candidates sit and wait. In the future, I will try and work on being more patient. In this case, having a good job has affording me the luxury of not living/dying on getting another job offer. I might not be so lucky in the future. I guess I have a different take on this... If you were the top candidate, any hiring manager worth their salt, busy or not, would keep you "warm". This doesn't mean only talking to you when you call but also letting you know in advance what is going on. This isn't necessarily true if the hiring manager only says "we like you and are considering you for the job". But if you actually got a "verbal offer", that puts you in an entirely different category. Further, you are probably one of several candidates from which they can choose and feel that if you aren't around when they get to you, they will call someone else. Further also, if party B is now going to talk to you it sounds like you are out of the running with party A. Finally, if you knew someone in HR within the company, even if it was a big company, you should have used that connection to get the inside info rather than just calling the hiring manager. See what happens with party B but continue to look for a job outside this company. | |
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