4

From the Offer to the Decision

After you finish the interview process, you’ll eventually hear back from the organizations you met. Logically speaking, of course, there are only two possibilities: an offer or news that you didn’t get the job. This chapter focuses on the time between when you hear back from an organization and when you decide whether to accept an offer.

I’ll start by talking briefly about what to do when you don’t get a job you wanted. Most of this chapter, though, will focus on how to negotiate with an organization most effectively and ways to think about your decision.

First, the Bad News

Your motivational brain engages with goals that are important to you. For many people involved in a job search, few goals are more important than getting a particular job. They are deeply invested in that goal.

Your degree of engagement with a goal determines the strength of your emotional reaction relating to it. Whether that reaction is positive or negative depends on whether you succeed or fail. I used to be a huge sports fan, so when the New York Giants lost a football game, it could ruin my day. But as I have gotten older, my commitment to sports in general has declined. Hearing that the Giants lost a game has at most a mild influence on my emotional state these days.

When you learn that you didn’t get a job you really wanted, you’ll have a strong negative reaction. You might be sad, anxious, or angry. The particular emotional experience you have depends on how you appraise the situation. As I mentioned in chapter 2, emotion is an interpretation of your feelings. You’ll be sad if you focus primarily on the opportunity you lost. You’ll be anxious if you focus on your need to get a job. You’ll be angry if you think that someone (perhaps the recruiter) did something unfair in the process of making the decision.

For example, I had a discussion with two colleagues who applied for positions at our university. Both were passed over in favor of other candidates, and (predictably) both experienced a significant negative response. One colleague focused on the lost opportunity and so was sad and disappointed for a while after getting the news. The other felt that the hiring committee had failed to recognize a sustained commitment to the university. This colleague experienced a lot of anger toward the committee and the university. The same situation can lead to very different emotional responses depending on your interpretation of what happened.

When you first learn that you didn’t get a job, your initial reaction may be to do something about it.

Don’t.

When you’re feeling strongly negative about some outcome, many actions may seem reasonable in the moment. You may want to fire off an email or make a phone call. You may want to complain loudly to lots of people that you should have gotten the job.

Such reactions are unlikely to help you get a job (at that organization or anywhere else) in the long term. And when it comes to a career, you have to be willing to play the long game.

So the first thing you need to do is give yourself a chance to calm down. Get some exercise or go dancing to release any energy you have. Do yoga or meditate. Get a good night’s sleep before you do anything at all.

A big reason not to complain much is that you never know whether things you say may get back to the organization, and you don’t want to burn any bridges. I interviewed at the University of Texas in 1993, and though my interview went quite well, the job was offered to someone else. I kept up my contacts with the department, and five years later, when another position opened up, I was invited to apply. I have now worked there for more than twenty years.

After you’ve given yourself time to calm down, you can think about whether to reach out to the company that rejected you. If you were part of a large recruitment pool, it may not be helpful to do so, because the recruiters are unlikely to remember you well. But if you feel that you made a personal connection with the recruiters (and the job was one you were really interested in), it might be worthwhile to reiterate your interest in the organization and ask for some feedback about how you could improve in future interviews.

By asking for ways to improve, you’re not implying that the recruiter made a mistake—you’re demonstrating that you’re interested in learning how to get better at the things you do. Sometimes you can get useful feedback from these interactions. At worst, you will have reminded the recruiter that you’re quite interested. Indeed, my oldest son (mentioned in chapter 1) was at first rejected by the company he eventually went to work for. He reached out for feedback because he thought the interview had gone pretty well. During that call, the recruiter decided to bring him in for a second interview and then hired him.

The main thing to remember is that every interaction you have with an organization affects your social network. You want to increase the number of people who have a positive opinion of you and minimize the number of people who don’t. This is particularly important to bear in mind when you’re experiencing strong negative emotions.

Negotiation Time

And then there’s the day you get a call saying that you’re being offered a job. You’ll still feel a strong reaction, but it’s likely to be one of happiness, joy, and excitement—perhaps tempered with nervousness.

You have some work to do before you’re ready to actually sign on the dotted line. You have to negotiate the terms of your employment. You have more leverage at this point than you’re likely to have for some time to come. The firm has said that it wants you to work there, and now it’s in recruiting mode. Once you accept the job, you won’t have the same power to negotiate until it’s clear that you might move elsewhere or your performance has gotten so good that your employer wants to reward you. So this is the time to create a situation that will help you achieve your goals.

The first thing you need to do is engage your cognitive brain and prepare for the negotiation.

Fixing the Information Asymmetry

The fundamental difficulty with negotiating is the information asymmetry between you and the firm that wants to hire you. You know your own needs and what you would accept for salary, benefits, start date, signing bonus, and vacation. The company knows who it has as backup in case the negotiation with you falls through, how much it normally pays for positions like the one you’re being offered, and the range of other ways it compensates employees, such as year-end bonuses, commission rates for salespeople, and education benefits. Unless your offer is from a very small firm, it also has a lot more experience negotiating terms of employment than you do. That means your first task is to reduce the information asymmetry by learning as much as you can about the company you’re negotiating with.

To overcome this asymmetry, take a systematic approach to preparing for your negotiation. Do not rely on your intuition about when you’re ready. Lots of research on construal level suggests that things that are distant in time, space, or social relationships are conceptualized more abstractly than things that are up close.

When you’re distant from actually working at a company, you are likely to focus on the seemingly most important elements of the job offer, such as salary and vacation time. However, many specific details about a position that may not seem crucial from this distance will become important once you’re an employee. These range from the space in which you’ll be working (office, cubicle, shared desk) to compensation (retirement plan, bonus structure) to career development (mentoring, education benefits) to hours (flextime, weekend work, overtime), to relocation expenses if you have to move to take the job.

Start by listing all the questions about an employment package that you’ll want to consider. After you make your own list of questions, show it to a few other people to make sure you haven’t missed anything significant.

After that, you need to answer those questions. You may know how to address a few of these questions from your own experience, but make sure to check other sources as well. Look for connections in the industry (or better still, inside the firm where you have an offer), and learn how similar companies structure their compensation packages. People may not want to tell you their exact salary, but you can discover how their compensation and benefits are set up. Many companies want to highlight what they offer, so you can also ask the recruiter. As I’ll discuss in a little while, just because you’re negotiating with people doesn’t mean they’re adversaries.

Next determine what you want to get out of the negotiation. Start by assessing your needs. How much money do you (and others who may depend on your income) need to survive (and thrive) where you’ll be living for this job? What aspirations do you have that might change that amount over the next few years? If you and a partner have discussed having children, for example, you should factor that in. Will you be able to save anything for emergencies and future goals?

Think about your ideal work schedule. You may feel most comfortable with the traditional nine-to-five. However, other passions may influence your ideal. Because I play in a band, I know a number of musicians. Many of them have taken jobs that accommodate the late nights common to playing live music. One, for example, is a baker, so he works a shift starting at 3:00 a.m.—just about the time he gets out of a late gig. Others have arranged to start their day jobs at 10:00 a.m. so that they can get a little sleep after a club date.

You also want to prioritize the various aspects of the offer. Which factors are you unwilling to budge on? Which are you willing to trade off? Determine your areas of flexibility in preparing for the negotiation. Perhaps you’re willing to trade a little of your salary for a signing bonus that would cover the expense of relocating to a new town. Don’t wait until the actual negotiation to contemplate the kinds of trade-offs you’re willing to make. Once the negotiation starts, you will feel pressure to make a deal, and you might make concessions you’ll regret later.

Now it’s time to get specific information related to your needs. What is the salary range for positions like the one you’re being offered? Many employment websites will show you typical compensation packages for similar positions, and many of them also break those ranges down by region to take into account cost-of-living factors.

If you know people in the industry, they can provide valuable information—particularly if your online research doesn’t turn up any position clearly comparable to the one you’re taking. I was talking with D (the name he actually goes by), who retired from the military after a distinguished thirty-year career and went to look for a job in the private sector. He got an offer from a large consulting firm to manage a project it was doing for a military base. It turned out that D knew the primary contact for the military base, so he was able to get information about the size and scope of the contract that supported his salary request, which was ultimately granted.

The goal of all this effort is to minimize the extent to which you’re negotiating without any knowledge of the firm’s position. You want to know which aspects of the offer are negotiable and to lay out your core needs.

What Is Negotiation?

Before you can negotiate effectively, you have to understand what a negotiation is and how to think about the ideal outcome.

A negotiation is a way of resolving a perceived conflict of interest, which is any situation in which the goals of two parties differ. An employee may want to be paid as much as possible for work, while an employer may want to minimize costs. I say “perceived” in this definition because in many situations, one party makes unwarranted assumptions about what the other party wants. A firm may want to keep its employees happy and so may be willing to pay significantly more than the minimum to hire and retain talent.

Most people walk into negotiations with an implicit metaphorical framing for negotiation. Metaphors are ways of talking about the world that conceptualize one domain in terms of another. For example, you might say, “Sarita attacked Juan’s arguments until he retreated.” If so, you are talking about an argument as if it were a war.

Placing a particular metaphorical frame around a situation often affects how you judge success and failure. Thinking about an argument as a war assumes that if you don’t persuade the other side to come to your position, you’ve lost. Within this frame, reaching a mutual understanding of a complex issue would not be viewed as a positive outcome.

The dominant metaphorical frame for negotiation has two sides sitting across the table from each other with the agreement somewhere on the table between them. If the agreement moves closer to one party, it necessarily moves farther from the other. As a result, the two sides are engaged in a tug-of-war, with each side trying to get the most concessions from the other. In this view, negotiation is fundamentally competitive, so if one side is winning, the other is losing.

A consequence is that each party worries that the other will try to take advantage of any information it gets. So parties often withhold information about what they want or need, assuming that an information asymmetry creates power for their negotiating position.

It’s worth considering an alternative metaphorical frame for negotiations in employment contexts. Think about walking side by side with your negotiation partner into a landscape. The negotiated agreement is somewhere out there, and the only constraint is that you must reach it together.

In this view, negotiation is more about joint problem solving than about winning. This approach opens up potential win-win situations in which both parties have the same goal. For example, you might want to take two months off to travel before starting a new job. Your prospective employer might be building out new office space and want a few months before you start. If you assume that the goals of the other side oppose yours, you may not ask for exactly what you want, fearing that the other party will walk away from the table. You might reach a deal that is actually worse for both of you.

In addition, when you treat a negotiation as an opportunity to walk together, you’ll disclose information about your needs and wants. Your negotiation partner can’t help you reach your goals without knowing what they are. It may be that your partner can’t give you what you want the way you want it, but may be able to do so in a different way.

For example, Suzanne was negotiating for a sales job. She was hoping to make a six-figure salary. The company had very little cash available to offer as a base salary, but it was willing to increase the commission to the point where a good performance would allow Suzanne to reach her goal. Working together enabled them to reach an agreement that they would not have gotten to had they not both been clear about their goals and constraints.

The key point here is that an information asymmetry about your real goals does not help in negotiation with a prospective employer. If you want or need something, let the employer know. If what you want or need is inconsistent with the goals and values of the firm and it tells you so, you’ve learned something valuable. Often, though, your prospective employer has options you’re unaware of for reaching your goals in ways you never considered. But you won’t find that out unless you tell the employer what you really want.

Launching the Negotiation

How can you get the negotiation started?

One of the most prominent discoveries in psychology over the past fifty years is the anchoring and adjustment heuristic first outlined by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. The idea is quite simple. When trying to place a value on something, people fixate on a number in their mental environment. They may know that the number is wrong and thus adjust it in the direction they think is correct. However, they often adjust insufficiently, misvaluing the item as a result.

As a quick example outside the domain of value, suppose someone asks you what year George Washington was elected president of the United States. The year the Declaration of Independence was signed, 1776, is a prominent historical anchor. You know Washington had to have been elected later than that, so you adjust. However, you’re likely to adjust insufficiently, in part because the Revolutionary War was much longer than most more-recent conflicts. You might think that it took about six years, and so guess that Washington was elected in 1783. In fact the Constitutional Convention wasn’t held until 1787, and Washington was elected president in 1789.

In negotiations, the first numbers you see or hear can anchor discussion about key values for the rest of the negotiation. Throughout the course of a negotiation, figure out what numbers you may be using as anchors and be careful not to get too attached to them. Connor—a longtime recruiter—talks about a mistake that applicants fresh out of college commonly make. They look at the salary range given by the firm when advertising a position, anchor on the top end of that range, and get angry when the firm tries to negotiate them lower. They may walk away from an offer thinking that the firm is trying to lowball them.

It’s important to understand the function of a salary range. The top end tells experienced employees whether this job is a potential move up from their current job—something that can be hard to tell from the job description alone. A top end of $48,000 tells someone already making $52,000 that the job probably isn’t a good fit.

The bottom end of the range shows what the company expects to pay someone with little or no experience, such as a recent college graduate. Fixating on the top end of the range when you have no experience is likely to cause you dissatisfaction. Anchor on the bottom end instead and adjust upward to reach the salary you’ll ask for.

Another source of anchors in negotiation can come from having a job offer in hand. In negotiation parlance, the other offer is a BATNA, which stands for “best alternative to a negotiated agreement.” If your negotiation with this firm falls through, what’s your alternative? If you have another offer in hand, your alternative is to take it. If you don’t, your best alternative is to return to your job search.

Obviously, it’s more comfortable to be negotiating with a firm if you already have another job offer, because you may feel that you can take some risk in your negotiations over this one. It’s also natural to use the offer you have as an anchor—in other words, adjust the salary you’ve been offered upward as a request to the new firm.

If you adopt this strategy, though, you may inadvertently leave money on the table. The company may actually be willing to pay you much more than you ask for. So make sure you know the salary range for that position. You don’t want to anchor on your BATNA when you could have done much better.

Finally, pay attention to how you frame your anchor—and to how numbers are framed when you see them. Suppose you ask for a salary of $51,000. This anchor communicates that you expect the negotiation to focus on the smallest non-zero digit. You expect a counteroffer of $48,000. Notice, though, that you’re now talking about some fairly significant money, because $3,000 works out to $250 a month. That’s a couple of trips to the grocery store and a night out.

Suppose instead that you ask for $51,400. Now you’re communicating that you expect the negotiation to be over hundreds rather than thousands of dollars. Research by Adam Galinsky and colleagues provides some evidence that negotiators are sensitive to these more specific anchors—provided you don’t go crazy with them. (Asking for a salary of $51,432.04 won’t get you a specific response.) Try an anchor that is one level down from what your intuition tells you to ask for. It may constrain the range of counteroffers you get, landing you right where you wanted to be.

Listen and Learn

A theme of this book is that your social brain can help you learn a lot about your prospective employer. That certainly holds true in the negotiation process. A willingness to negotiate and to look for solutions to any impasses tells you a lot about how flexible the company is willing to be in working with you and how likely it is to seek innovative solutions to problems after you start your job.

Heather told me about an experience she had as a recruiter hired by a high-tech firm to find an executive assistant for the CEO. She found the perfect candidate, who asked for a salary of $65,000. Citing cost-of-living differences between cities, the firm counteroffered $55,000. The candidate did not want to take a pay cut from her previous job and held firm at $65,000. The firm came up to $57,500 with a promise of a $7,500 bonus, but it wouldn’t be specific about the criteria required to get the bonus. The candidate was concerned that this reflected a lack of respect for her talent and expertise. She elected to take the job but left soon after, because her experience at the company mirrored what happened during the interview.

Some of the information you get about a company will be positive, of course—even if it doesn’t give you everything you asked for. Connor, whom I mentioned in an earlier story, pointed out that many candidates who ask for salaries at the high end of the range even though they have no relevant experience in the industry don’t understand how much they’ll need to learn to do the job properly. His firm talks to recruits about the amount of training it does during employees’ first several years to help them excel at their jobs.

Candidates value this education if they recognize that the firm is investing in their future—if they learn, they will ultimately be able to command a higher salary at this firm or another one. Candidates who fixate on salary alone walk away from Connor’s firm. Many of them are hired by companies that don’t offer such a generous package of training.

When you first start negotiating with an organization, it’s useful to have a mentor who can advise you about how to interpret the situation. Are you being given a good reason why your salary is lower than you would like? Why can’t the company be flexible about paid time off? When you don’t get what you want in a negotiation, you may blame the firm and assume that something about it makes it uncooperative. It’s important to know whether you’re missing something crucial that might clarify why your demands weren’t reasonable. A more experienced colleague may be able to help you read the tea leaves after a negotiation that didn’t go exactly as you’d hoped.

Thinking and Doing at the Right Times

A line of research begun by Arie Kruglanski and Tory Higgins is rooted in the observation that the motivational brain has a thinking mode and a doing mode. In the thinking mode, you process information about a situation. You are considering options and working through problems. In the doing mode, you prepare for action. You get impatient when you’re held back from making progress on something. Metaphors capture this distinction: you may talk about taking a step back for more contemplation versus moving forward with a plan.

During a negotiation, you need to pay attention to these modes. While you’re still trying to improve the deal you’re working on, you want to remain in the thinking mode. You’re looking for ways to get more of your needs met. When you feel that you’ve gotten the best deal you can, you want to flip into the doing mode to reach an agreement and sign on the dotted line.

Ideally, that’s the way it would work.

But recruiters can manipulate situations to influence your motivational mode. Putting a deadline on an offer is a way to spur action. The closer you get to the deadline, the more pressure you feel to act rather than think.

You can also negotiate about the deadline, though. Employers feel time pressure. Several candidates may be waiting to hear about a job, and some of them may be people the company would want if you don’t take the job. At the same time, employers want you to be fully committed to the job you take so that they won’t lose you several months later when a better opportunity comes along.

You should ask for a deadline extension if you need it. When I was a fairly new PhD looking for an academic job, I got an offer from the University of Illinois at Chicago. About a week before I was supposed to make a final decision about that offer, I got a call from Columbia University inviting me to interview for a position there. I contacted the folks at Illinois and asked for an extension. They granted it, because they didn’t want me to accept their position under duress. Ultimately, I got the job at Columbia, and Illinois hired someone else.

In addition to circumstances, your own thoughts can influence your motivational mode. Job searches are stressful because they involve a lot of uncertainty. You may just want to get it over with. If you jump into the doing mode, you might start applying for all kinds of jobs and be tempted to take the first offer you get, rather than staying in the thinking mode and waiting before responding to an offer that isn’t ideal for you.

This is another time when having someone to advise you can be helpful. When the job market is good, you don’t need to leap at the first offer that comes along. It can be hard to stay motivated in a job that is a poor fit for you. And a job whose salary and benefits don’t meet your needs is one that you may have to leave sooner rather than later. A good mentor can help you decide when you might be better off waiting for a better offer.

Reaching a Decision

At some point, you need to decide. Is this job the one for you? For now, I’m going to focus on choices when you aren’t currently employed, though much of what follows also applies when you have a job and are looking for another. In chapter 9, I take up some other issues that are specific to deciding whether to change jobs.

A big factor in this decision is whether the job meets a significant number of your needs. What is the purpose of your job search in the first place? In chapter 2, I talked about the role of values in selecting the jobs you apply for. Look at those values. Does this job actually align with them? Does it provide what you need—whether that’s advancing along a career path, providing resources, or giving you the flexibility to pursue other passions?

One thing to remember is that the context of choice is not quite the same as the context once you start working. You may be lucky enough to have more than one offer in hand. If so, you’ll be tempted to compare the jobs with each other. One may offer a higher salary. The other may provide more training or give you a more flexible work schedule. Certainly, comparing the two jobs provides information that can be valuable. But the comparison also biases the information you use.

To see how this can happen, we have to delve a bit deeper into the structural alignment process that your cognitive brain uses to make comparisons. Dedre Gentner and I have been doing research on this process since I was a graduate student in her lab, many years ago.

When you compare two items, you start by finding all the commonalities you can between them. Some of those may be specific features that are identical. Both jobs may offer two weeks of paid time off, for example. Others may be dimensions—for instance, both jobs will provide you with a salary, but one may pay you more than the other. Because such differences require a point of commonality—that is, both provide salaries—they are called alignable differences. Research suggests that when people make comparisons, they focus on alignable differences, because commonalities between options are not very useful for deciding between them.

However, some elements of one option may have no correspondence in the other. For example, one job may offer funding for continuing education, while the other does not. Elements that are unique to one item are called nonalignable differences. Studies demonstrate that comparisons de-emphasize nonalignable differences. That means you may discount a property unique to one of the options at the time you make the choice, even though that property may become important later.

So rather than just comparing the options, focus on them individually. Imagine yourself working at each company. Think back on your experiences with the firm, such as your interview or a visit to the corporate headquarters. That will help you imagine actually being in that job.

Of course, even if you notice a nonalignable difference, you may still discount it, because you’re not sure how to evaluate it. Is $2,000 in continuing education benefits good or bad? If it was alignable with another offer, that would be easier to determine. After all, a $5,000 benefit is clearly better than a $2,000 one. You need a little more expertise to determine the real value of nonalignable aspects of an offer. That is another place where it may be useful to have an expert to help you.

Reasons and Reactions

As you consider your options, you’re likely to engage both your intuitive cognitive brain and your more deliberative cognitive brain. Daniel Kahneman popularized terminology first used by Keith Stanovich and Richard West, who called the intuitive cognitive brain System 1 and the deliberative cognitive brain System 2.

People have a tendency to focus on the deliberative system for making choices. Many studies show that they often select a particular option because it’s easy to justify the choice. And the many reasons you generate to make a career choice certainly are important. You should pay attention to all the reasons for and against each option you have.

At the same time, your feelings matter, too. Research by Tim Wilson and colleagues suggests that the emotional reactions you have to options often integrate more information than do the reasons you generate. A good reason is compact and easy to state, but your emotions cut across many different facets of a choice. In addition, reasons tend to focus on things that are easy to talk about, such as salary, benefits, and vacation. Your emotional reactions can be hard to put into words. If you get a tour of the office, you may get a good or a bad vibe from it. Perhaps you’re reacting to tension among the employees in a way that would be hard to describe. You have a bad feeling, but you don’t know why.

Don’t discount such reactions. If you have some concerns about a particular company, try to get more information to help you understand them. Talk to employees. Read reviews on employment websites from current and former employees. I cohost a weekly radio show and podcast called Two Guys on Your Head with Bob Duke. Bob is fond of saying that a good decision should think right and feel right. There’s a lot of wisdom there. If the reasons you have for a choice and your emotional reactions are misaligned, try to figure out why before moving forward.

Spreading Coherence

As you start leaning toward a particular choice, two factors influence your inclination. First, you engage in motivated reasoning. That is, your motivational brain starts to interpret information in a way that is consistent with the outcome you want. You understand potentially ambiguous information in a way that fits with what you desire. If you hear various rumors about the companies you’re considering, you’re more likely to believe the ones that are consistent with your desired outcome.

Second, as research on decision making by Jay Russo and colleagues has demonstrated, your cognitive brain shifts attention toward information that is consistent with your current preferences and away from both negative aspects of your desired choice and positive aspects of competing choices. As a result, the desired outcome appears even better than it actually is. This mechanism creates a spreading coherence of beliefs. Over time, people come to view their preference as their only possible choice.

It’s important to be aware that this is happening, particularly if you do receive some negative information about an employer you’re considering. You might be tempted to discount it.

To ensure that you take information that conflicts with your growing inclination into account, systematically document information about your options. If you visit a prospective employer, don’t then rely on your memory—take notes immediately after the experience about your impressions and any specific information you got from recruiters or current employees. Similarly, keep notes on your interview and other contacts with recruiters. Retain all your emails from people at the firm and read them over in the course of making your decision.

The spreading coherence of a choice has an impact primarily on your memory and attention. External aids such as lists and emails can ensure that you don’t forget key pieces of information as you go along.

Don’t Look Back

Once you’ve made a choice, you have a path. Forge ahead.

You may be tempted to keep comparing your choice with others that you rejected. Little is to be gained from this exercise. Undoubtedly you passed up some good things by rejecting other options in favor of the one you picked. But your career success is now tied to this option.

Even if you have misgivings about your choice, don’t let them demotivate you. Your ability to impress the people you work with starts with your commitment to the firm and its mission. So once you make your choice, embrace it fully. You aren’t married to this job or this company forever, but you are tied to it for now. In part 2, I will talk about some of the key drivers of success in your job.

Saying No

You may be lucky enough to have more than one option. In that case, you’re going to have to disappoint someone by turning them down. When letting a prospective employer know you won’t be accepting a job, keep two things in mind.

First, try not to let the difficulty of declining an offer affect your decision. Your motivational brain can kick into avoidance mode when faced with actions you resist. If a prospective employer has been very nice to you, you may feel bad about turning down the offer. As I will discuss in more detail in chapter 6, it’s hard in general to deliver bad news. The job you’re thinking of turning down may become more appealing. After all, if you can find a reason to say yes, you won’t have to contact the firm to say no.

This is when you need to take the long view of the work relationships you’re developing. Prospective employers know that they’re competing for your services. Whereas you may not say no to a lot of jobs during your lifetime, recruiters are turned down all the time. They generally don’t take it personally. (If they do, you probably don’t want to work at their company, because they’re putting their own goals well ahead of yours.) You need to make the best decision for your career, independent of the desires of the firm recruiting you.

Second, as with other aspects of the job recruitment process, the way you decline an offer will affect your social network. Your aim is to say no to a particular job offer while maintaining a positive reputation with the firm.

If you’ve developed a personal relationship with the recruiters, turn down the job in a phone call rather than in an email. You may find the social distance provided by an email appealing, but you should make a direct connection. Thank the recruiters for their time and interest. If the decision was hard for you to make, say so. You’re likely to encounter people from this company again throughout your career. You may even want a job there someday. Maintaining a cordial relationship will keep the door open for the future.