A few weeks ago I was interviewing with three different companies. I was focused on finding somewhere with a good culture and a relatively quick start date.
The third place I interviewed – I wasn’t super interested in the company itself, but the team I’d be joining and work I’d be doing seemed like a good fit. The founder did my initial call, really liked me and offered me a second / final interview to meet the line manager before the call ended. Said he already thought she’d really like me and was excited to move forward that same week with a view to offering a job asap. Great.
Well the next day one of the other companies offered me a job with immediate start, and I was more aligned with their company and culture anyway so informally accepted it, pending paperwork.
I politely emailed the founder of company #3 and said thank you I really enjoyed the convo but unfortunately took another offer. Best of luck.
He comes back and says: that’s really disappointing you were the front runner and is there anything we can do to get you to reconsider? Now we’ve only had an initial phone call but he’s obviously seen my application, my LinkedIn and spoken to me. So I said, that’s really nice to hear. What’s the potential remuneration and benefits package? Aka what exactly am I giving up a sure thing for…
He responds with a non-answer about how the salary range is broad and they try to match the candidates expectations (I’d already told him what mine was, so why not make an offer?) and the benefits were basically being remote. Which I only applied to remote roles, so.
But then he tells me he’d be very concerned about anyone only taking a role for the money and that he’d need to be sure I’m actually aligned with the company mission and not in it for the money.
Sir. Do you understand what work is?
I tried to explain to him that if I have an offer and he wants me to reconsider, I’m reasonably going to want to know what for. He then tries to tell me – well you’ve only had one interview with us! like I’m being unreasonable or triggered this discussion. Wild.
So yeah I took the original offer.