On a related note about candidates not understanding offers, has Uber stopped the practice of calling candidates in the morning, making them an offer, and demanding that they accept or decline by the end of the day? I doubt it was helping candidates understand their compensation package.
I worked at a competing company a few years ago and we had to deal with this with many candidates we were recruiting.
This happened to me a few months ago at a different company and I was shocked by how unprofessional I thought that approach was. I ended up declining the offer because I thought that kind of pressure to commit was an indicator of how poorly the company may be run. It was for a senior level position and I had been at the same firm for nearly five years and it just seemed unnecessarily aggressive.
It's not really an indicator of how well or poorly it's run, but it definitely is an indicator of the culture there (had a 48 hour exploding offer before, and the C brass culture was quite toxic).
I think it depends on how the culture is toxic. Amazon's culture seems to be "toxic" in a very specific way: that it selects for a very particular kind of person, with particular kinds of motivations - those who don't align with that are unhappy and leave quickly, those that are stay and perform very well.
I think there are ways Amazon could improve its culture, but apart from widening the potential pool of effective hires, I'm not sure it would benefit the company a huge amount. However I think Amazon is the exception to the rule, and in general I think toxic cultures are a significant hindrance to most companies.
I don't like this practice at all, just to be clear, but let me play devil's advocate for a second:
Let's say that a company is trying to hire for "a senior level position", as you put it. Let's also take it as an assumption that senior level positions are relatively unique, carry responsibility within the company, and are not a homogeneous fungible engineering role. In other words, you can't hire two people for one senior level position and squeeze them both in somewhere.
The company doesn't just interview one candidate at a time, much as a candidate doesn't interview only one company. If there are two candidates in the pipeline and the company likes both of them, it would be unethical to give both candidates an offer at the same time (since the company can only hire one person, it would need to rescind the offer from one of those two people if they both accepted).
So, the company might tell the candidate they like most: "We really like you for this position. We'll give you 24 hours to decide, and hold the position until then. After that, since we can't hold up our recruiting pipeline indefinitely while you decide, the offer may expire." If you are a candidate, getting an offer a day or two later than you're expecting could seem like a big delay, after all.
I assume that this is not what you were told, or how it was messaged, but how would you feel about a situation like that? How would you want it to be messaged? If multiple people are competing for one position, you can only have one outstanding offer at a time, which means it needs to have a reasonable time expiration so that the next-best candidate gets a chance to consider it.
Alternatively, I suppose you could say, "We're giving both you and someone else an offer simultaneously. First person to accept gets it." But that seems equally bad (especially since the candidate has no way to know whether it's even true).
It seems like the higher level a position you're interviewing for, and the more unique, the shorter a time window the company can have to leave the offer open. When someone is given the offer to be the CEO of a large company, do they get more than a day to decide?
Granted, none of this reasoning should apply to typical engineering positions that people regularly encounter, for companies that want to hire as many people as they can, and I am not trying to excuse pointless exploding offers.
> It seems like the higher level a position you're interviewing for, and the more unique, the shorter a time window the company can have to leave the offer open. When someone is given the offer to be the CEO of a large company, do they get more than a day to decide?
My experience is exactly opposite: For low level candidates, candidates are often reasonably interchangeable, so losing a candidate by demanding quick decisions is ok - you just pick the next on your list. For really high level candidates, the search cost can reach five or even six digits, and can last for months, and negotiations can go on for weeks. (EDIT: for actually high level positions, it's not unusual for the candidate to have their lawyer review documents etc. prior to accepting an offer as well, so one day deadlines would often be impossible in practice even if there was nothing to negotiate)
There can be truly desperate situations where someone badly needs a position filled right away, but that's generally a warning sign that they're understaffed and/or have not ensured proper cross-training, and will be a nightmare to work for if they've not learned their lesson.
Tell them that they can send the contract. It's not binding either way.
If you already have the contract. Tell them back that you need a few days to check your notice period and paperwork. It's just not possible to move that fast. (How the hell did they even made up a contract and a background check before they get the information?)
The more you go up the chain. The more exclusive (i.e. no other people in the entire city for this position) and the longer the negotiation might be (you're hell not leaving your place at the snap of a finger from a 20 year old HR person who's bullshitting you).
P.S. EVERY ONE gets more than one day to decide. Don't expect people to be available on phone or email whenever you want.
>It seems like the higher level a position you're interviewing for, and the more unique, the shorter a time window the company can have to leave the offer open.
It really depends on each side's BATNA [1]. If you have stronger walk away power, it's foolish for the offer to come with short acceptance terms.
Your whole line of reasoning is predicated on the following huge flaw:
>If you are a candidate, getting an offer a day or two later than you're expecting could seem like a big delay, after all.
In your very unrealistic CEO hypothetical, do you suppose it would be a big delay for you if you were offered the "CEO" position a week from Thursday instead of Monday, since between Monday and Friday they were trying to recruit another person?
I mean just how fast do you think these companies move! Do you imagine these people are basically in the waiting room, interviewing the same day - "So are you interviewing for the CEO position too?" "Yep. Do you know anything about this company?" "Just what I read in the Journal" "Me too. Hey, they're calling me." "Good luck!"
These things get easier when you don't read your emails every day.
You just check your email and then you discover the stupid offer is already gone. You can skip straight to the "acceptance" phase and the "god. they are really dumb".
This is just negotiation trick. In general, they might simply be interested in knowing if you are genuinely excited about the job or not.
In these cases you should just say "yes - I accept. Please send me paperwork for my lawyer to review and sign". Then the real negotiations starts :-) There is one book (forgot the name) which explains that tactic and how to respond to it.
I was given an offer with non-aggressive deadline of 2 weeks.
In terms of the equity portion, they were pretty straightforward with me and I had no surprises with my equity portion. In addition, none of my coworkers have complained about their packages either. I don't know this employee but he certainly doesn't speak for the vast majority of us.
That said I don't know what recruiters are doing these days. My boss would never let our recruiter pull shit like that, but I can't speak for other teams.
> none of my coworkers care. I'm sure very early employees may care but I don't know any and I can't speak for them
Interesting that your colleagues and you don't seem to care that the management had instituted policies that hurt the very engineers who first built up the company. I would be very wary of such a management that it would some day turn against me too.
I had an offer from Uber and was given sufficient time to decide and turn them down.
I had a whole host of reasons for turning them down many of which felt dirty/scammy/untrustworthy and nothing about this story surprises me but I didn't have the specific experience that you've described.
Just ignore it, it's shitty recruiter tricks. It might even be an individual recruiter and not SOP. I've never heard of this before from uber or on their glassdoor when I looked a while back.
> the practice of calling candidates in the morning, making them an offer, and demanding that they accept or decline by the end of the day?
Sounds like an effective filter to have applicants self-select for the combination of never questioning higher-ups and low diligence fast decisionmaking.
Brilliant in the same way as bad grammar in "Nigerian prince" mails.
Reminds me of my second job. I have a firm rule of answering phone calls only when I feel like doing so. I didn't feel like answering the call about the job offer over the weekend :). Still got the job.
The funny thing is, in general people tend to respond positively to you not being available every second of the day. Sometimes it backfires, but most of the time setting limits tends to 1) make you look busier, 2) signaling that your time is valuable to you.
Both tends to make people think you're more important and worth more, not usually make them strike you off their list and move on to the next person.
The exception would be really low level positions where they see people as interchangeable, but even then in most cases people have already mentally chosen you when they call, and not being available makes you more desirable, not less, so for them to move on they need to have cared very little to begin with.
... which is another reason to not be instantly available - I for one don't want to work for people who see little enough value in me to be prepared to drop me if I don't answer the phone 24/7 unless I've been contracted specifically to be available at any time (and you better believe they'll pay through the nose for that).
A lot of younger employees could do with learning to set boundaries, be unavailable and say "no", and experience how that can often get them a lot more respect and better job conditions.
It's not if you're offering a contract with shitty fishhooks designed to fuck over anyone who hasn't had a good lawyer spend some time looking over the contract - then it's a very rational ploy, with the side-effect of checking how easy it is to bully a potential hire into acting against their own best interests.
What you as an employee should think about that is left as an exercise for the reader.
If they're going to be that aggressive/shortsighted with negotiating, why not -- at least counter -- accept the offer Then, get competing offers and if Uber loses, quit.
If their compensation is substantially off, they deserve the employee churn.
Entry level offers made to students are really an entirely different ballgame. They're usually made months in advance of the expected start date, often as far out as 8-10 months.
I worked at a competing company a few years ago and we had to deal with this with many candidates we were recruiting.