How To Lose A Job Candidate In 10 Days

The following is an interview process for a job position in a small tech firm that I went through. I’ll change the names of the people and company involved so as to not ruffle any feathers.

I was working at IBM at the time and was getting a bit frustrated with my compensation. At IBM there were predefined bands or levels for each software developer. Something like: entry level, staff, advisory software developer etc. The previous year was super successful for me. I co-authored a patent plus was taking on a lot of responsibility for a particular product. The work that I was performing was above my band, specifically I was an entry level developer but performing staff and sometimes advisory level tasks. After all that “high performance”, I ended up getting the highest rating one could get for their year end review. The rating was a +1. They only give out a handful of those ratings and rumor had it that it always came with a raise and promotion so I was pretty excited. After some time passed my manager wanted to discuss my review, so we sat down and he presented to me a paper stating what my salary increase would be. It ended up being barely a cost of living raise and no promotion. If that wasn’t enough, an intern that I had helped train and had just recently graduated from university was hired fulltime with a salary greater than mine. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy for him, but it didn’t feel fair to be paid less. Frustrated, I started applying for jobs on LinkedIn.

After some time, a company responded to my application and wanted to set up an interview. The lady who reached out, let’s call her Cassandra, was really kind and jovial. We talked about salary expectations and I told her I wanted 90K in Canadian dollars. I was shooting for the stars. She actually said that 90K would be doable! I think at the time I was making around 70K but can’t quite remember, but definitely lower than 90K. I went through several interviews some of which were ridiculous like the majority of software development interviews. The final one was with a man named Mark. It was a bit tough, especially because I was a bit nervous. If you’ve never been through a software developer interview then consider yourself lucky. They ask you questions that require on the spot problem solving while being nervous. Any who, I went home and a few days passed.

Cassandra finally reaches out and mentions how happy they were with me. She jumps into how they want to make an offer but unfortunately it will be for less money than the 90K. I knew it was too good to be true! The offer letter arrives in my email and I quickly open it up.

The offer states a salary of 76K. Whoa. That’s quite a drop from the discussed 90. I decide to mull it over and plan my next move. At this point I thought that maybe I just didn’t perform that well during the interview but still good enough to warrant an offer. The day was a Friday and while I was mulling over the offer, Mark sent me an email in the afternoon asking if I wanted to join the team at local restaurant. That was interesting since I hadn’t accepted the offer yet, but seemed like a positive sign nonetheless.

I finally came up with a response. Looking back at my response it’s a bit embarrassing. I wouldn’t do this today but here it is verbatim:

“Thanks for taking the time to write everything out. The job description given by you and everyone else has been on par with what I've been looking for. The fact that I would get a chance to engage in all layers of software development including directly working with the clients sounds awesome. I wouldn't say it's easy to compare me to your current team, nor would I compare them to my current team at IBM. We all have our strengths in our current situations. At IBM, I believe I've proven myself. I received the top contributor award last year, and 2nd place the year before. I have a pending patent on the way as well. I'm not trying to sound egotistical, I'm just pointing out that I've gone above and beyond so far at IBM, and I would most likely do the same at your company. I bring what I believe, are all the skills that your team seems to be searching for. And I know first hand at my current job and in my entire life experience that what you're looking for is a tough sell. You're looking for someone with decent soft skills, social skills, as well as sound technical abilities. It seems people are usually on one side of the spectrum. I believe in what I bring to the table, you should as well. That being said, I think for the responsibilities and abilities that this position would require, it would be fair to be compensated at 85 k per year.”

I sounded a bit full of myself which wasn’t my intention. Cassandra ended up forwarding this email to one of the head guys, let’s call him Steven.

She responds back saying Steven surprisingly has budged and is willing to offer 82K per year but there was something that he wanted to ensure that I was aware of. He wanted me to know that he doesn’t like to bring people in too high relative to their peers which might jeopardize future raises. I was a bit confused that he would leave off 3K and go with 82K vs 85K but whatevs.

So just to summarize, we agreed on 90K, got an offer for 76K, tried to haggle to 85K, and now have reached 82K.

In reality, at that time, 82K would have been decent, probably enough to move. But it was off-putting going from 90K to 76K. And then now back to 82K. Why not offer 82K from the get-go? It felt like I was negotiating for a used Toyota Corolla. The most annoying thing about this was the disclaimer that came with the 82K counter offer, e.g. we don’t like to bring people in too high relative to their peers. That part made me think immediately that I might not see a raise for a long time and maybe they’d consider me “highly paid” relative to everyone else, which can come with some weird pressure. So essentially, even though this offer was better than my current position, I declined it.

Steven really misplayed this especially with all the salary counter offers. Secondly if he had not said anything about future raises, I might have accepted the offer. He could have not said anything and still ensured he never gave me raises for a while and maybe I would have just dealt with that. If I ask for a raise and don’t get one that doesn’t mean I’m leaving the company, there might be other things that keep me there, e.g. the work, the people etc.

The funny thing was, months later Cassandra reached out and sent me this:

“You might remember that when I first started at SuperSoftwareTech (fake name), we made you an offer but it was not enough to attract you. I was pretty new and didn’t have the authority about offers that I do now (see my title – promotion!). The owner who was involved – and was inclined to lowball initial offers – has essentially retired and a new president has started.”

Haha!

I guess I didn’t do that bad…