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Antiwork

The (real) reason employers withhold comp and then lowball you at the end

I often see comments along the lines of “I was clear about my expectations! Why would they string me along and then make me an unacceptable lowball offer?!?!” I have been on the receiving end of this numerous times, myself. ​ Good news! I'm here to tell you why they do this. There IS a method to the madness. Let's say you won't accept less than 50k for the job. If I tell you this is a 40k job up front, you'll just drop out of the interview process. I lose. Why? Because your options at that stage are: Pursue lowball opportunity. Pursue other opportunities. The two options are on equal footing, both purely theoretical, but #2 is clearly more attractive. You only have so much time and energy, and you will invest it in the more promising path. Why would you jump through hoops for a job you're unlikely…


I often see comments along the lines of “I was clear about my expectations! Why would they string me along and then make me an unacceptable lowball offer?!?!” I have been on the receiving end of this numerous times, myself.

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Good news! I'm here to tell you why they do this. There IS a method to the madness.

Let's say you won't accept less than 50k for the job. If I tell you this is a 40k job up front, you'll just drop out of the interview process. I lose. Why? Because your options at that stage are:

  1. Pursue lowball opportunity.
  2. Pursue other opportunities.

The two options are on equal footing, both purely theoretical, but #2 is clearly more attractive. You only have so much time and energy, and you will invest it in the more promising path. Why would you jump through hoops for a job you're unlikely to accept and will probably leave at the first opportunity when you could spend that time pursuing better opportunities?

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BUT, if I string you along, and THEN make you a lowball offer right at the end, your options are different:

  1. Accept bird-in-hand lowball offer.
  2. Reject the offer….. and go back to job searching with no idea how long that will take or what other offers you might get.

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See how that changes things? If your choice is to risk additional months of unemployment and uncertainty (and without any guarantee of a better outcome!), that lowball becomes a potentially attractive option. Now that $40k, which is too low, has to be compared to the amount of time it would take you to find that $50k. How much are you losing while you hold out? How sure are you that $50 is going to appear? What is that $50k job going to look like? Is $40 really less than you can afford to accept? Lots of uncertainty to weigh against a hard (albeit low) offer…

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By holding off the lowball salary until they can give it to you as a bird-in-hand proposition, they can get you to evaluate it against the risk of 'NO OFFER' instead of on equal footing with other 'POTENTIAL OFFERS.' They get you to commit your time and resources sub-optimally on false pretense in order to lure you into a situation where their offer becomes more attractive. To a desperate candidate, a bad offer is often still 'better' than potential good offers that might never come or take too long to materialize.

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