What Do You Do With Multiple Job Offers

Feb 15

4 min read

“I’ve had an elegant sufficiency, anymore would be a superfluidity.”

- Cordelia Zaske (and unknown others)

Congratulations on your offer. Congratulations on your offer. Congratulations you might have an offer coming. Sometimes when it rains, it pours. You may work really hard and feel like you are getting nowhere and then suddenly the heavens open up. What do you do with multiple job offers?

This is the best kind of problem, but it still presents a challenge and an opportunity at the same time. There is a delicate balance to strike in this situation.

You want to emerge with the best position possible…this could mean compensation, upward mobility and/or job satisfaction.
It is in your best interest not to burn any bridges, if you can help it. Many industries can be relatively small, and you never know where you might run into the people you are interviewing with next.
Nothing is guaranteed at this point and the worst situation would be to wind up at the end of the process with no offers.

Recommendations? First, it is unlikely that all the positions you are currently pursuing will land at the same time. If this situation presents itself, you will often need to delay one offer and/or convince a potential company to accelerate an offer. Be prepared to try this approach. Ask for an additional week to consider the offer, or speak transparently to the company that hasn’t made the offer yet and explain that if you don’t get an offer in a few days that you may be ‘off the market.’

The delay. This strategy can work for a bit of time. Here are a few suggestions.

Ask for time to consider the offer. This may be over a weekend or ask for a week, or you want to talk it over with your spouse or parents. It is reasonable to read through the documents thoroughly and be sure about your decision.
Counteroffer. You can review the offer and then counter with some points of clarification or adjustment. This is a recommended strategy to get your best offer and a way to buy yourself some time. They will likely take your counteroffer and think through their response.
A delayed response. This approach has a bit more risk to it, but you could just not answer for some period. Often an offer letter will have an ‘expiration date’ on it, so be careful of that. You also run the risk of upsetting the prospective hiring company, so this strategy means you likely have time/room to maneuver.

The accelerator. Then try to work the other side of the coin and see if you can accelerate a decision on the other company’s part. This is a bit more challenging. Companies don’t like to be rushed. However, it will be telling about how strong a candidate you are for the role if they do push things along.

I think that transparency here is the best policy. Let the company you are in discussions with understand that you have an offer in hand. There isn’t a lot of downsides to this. They will appreciate your honesty, and you can gauge their response. If they are not willing to move faster on an offer, then you might be ranked a bit lower in their prospective candidate pool. You will get some intelligence about the situation from their reaction to your offer.

The feint. This is a less popular version, but under the idea that ‘this is war,’ then everything is on the table. In this situation you are restricted by a timeline for one of the offers and you can’t get the other offer to accelerate their offer. You accept the offer that you have in hand and indicate you will need 2, 3 or 4 weeks to give notice and then use this time to get a second offer in hand. The advantage here is that you have a bird in the hand, but you will potentially really burn a bridge with the company that has given you the first offer.

The reality is that companies don’t really recognize you as an employee until you start on Day 1 and most hiring managers hold their breath a bit until you show your face in the office on the first day. They recognize that your current company may make a counteroffer, you may get cold feet, or you may get another offer.

If you can get more than one offer during the same time period, now it is time to put a quick spreadsheet together. List out some of the key variables and do some soul searching on what is important to you. Compensation, benefits, PTO, hiring manager, distance to work, flexibility of schedule, upward mobility potential, and whatever else you feel is important. It is important to put it down in black and white so that you have rational facts to consider, and then you allow your gut to be the deciding factor.

If you are fortunate enough to get multiple offers, be smart enough to recognize this opportunity and make the most of it. Use time, communication and conversation to work each party in a professional way. The goal is to finish the discussions with everyone being fairly positive about you as a person and for you to land the best position at the best compensation. However, you may need to sacrifice a company’s opinion of you in order to land the best role and this is probably o.k. The odds of you applying again to the same company are likely pretty low, so you don’t have a lot to lose.

Multiple offers at the same time is not the norm. Don’t be disappointed if this isn’t your situation, but if it does happen then you need to have some strategies in mind to handle the situation and emerge with the best role possible.