Job Acceptance 101
The proper way to accept a job, the steps you need to take to make a career move as smoothly as possible, and how to exit a role with positivity and support from ex-employers. Check out our Job Acceptance Hacks!
Congratulations! You’ve received your job offer!
Now comes the hard part - exiting a job can be an emotional and challenging time for both you and your current employer, and the move to a new environment (especially post-pandemic) can be jarring.
But you also need to objectively consider your strategy for how you leave your current job and go about your job acceptance; how you give notice and support your current work colleagues; and how you survive the dreaded counter offer.
Accepting a job means progress - but it’s easy to look forward and forget what’s behind you, and the manner in which you accept and exit a job says a lot about you as a professional and as a colleague.
We’ve put together a helpful 3 part guide to help you traverse one of the most job-critical moments in your recruitment journey: Getting a Job Offer, How to give your Notice, and Counter Offer Mastery.
Notes:
Look out for the Job Acceptance Hack! points of discussion in each article.
They highlight some of the unique interpersonal and communication skills and hacks we’ve learned here at Sales Recruiters Dallas that make all the difference during the job acceptance.
Simply click on any one of the pages below to read more!
Getting a Job Offer
The Art of Resigning Pt 1 - Planning and Preparation
We spend 1/3rd of our lives at work.
Billions of people around the world spend the vast majority of their waking time making a living in any one of the many thousands of careers and professions. Quitting one is not easy.
People work for people. So leaving a job for a new path can feel like a curious mix of excitement and betrayal, and ownership of the entire process of accepting a new job hinges on your ability to ride the emotional wave of leaving a workplace.
The Art of Resigning Pt 2 - Paperwork!
Although it may not be on your immediate to-do list, you need to make sure you have all your ducks in a row in relation to your transition paperwork.
Get ready for the deluge of admin tasks due once you’ve handed in your notice. Alongside the numerous conversations you’ll be having with bosses and customers, workflow planning and succession, and dealing with the inevitable counter offer, you should prepare or start thinking about the following:
My First Job Offer
Getting your first job offer is a rite of passage, and everyone remembers their first!
No matter your education career to date - you could be an Ivy League Grad or someone who’s left high school with their eyes on joining the workforce - traversing the job application environment and snaring your first job is vindication of your applicability, interview prowess, eagerness to learn and hard working values.
How to give your Notice
After accepting your new job offer and, hopefully, spending some time celebrating your new opportunity and the path opening up in front of you, the next most important thing on the To-Do list is making it official with your current employer by handing in your notice.
Handing in your notice can be a nerve-wracking thing to do. From who to approach to when to do it, to what the notice period entails and how you hand over workloads, your notice period is like professional limbo, with an added sprinkling of emotional awkwardness and potentially toxic managerial backlash or reaction.
However, all you can do is monitor and control how you approach this tough conversation. Remember to stay above and beyond any workplace gossip and remain professional throughout - how your company reacts to your leaving says more about them than it does you.
Also, as we will go into in some of these blogs, how you hand in your notice will go a long way in setting the terms of your exit. It will set the scene of your notice period working environment and it can even determine how aggressive or “good” your counter offer will be.
Click on any of the below to read up how to hand in your notice:
How to hand in your notice with grace, respect and professionalism.
Handing in your notice is a nerve-wracking thing to do. Even when you’re eager to move jobs, or even actively unhappy in your role and you can’t wait to get out of the door, it’s still a test of nerve and will to approach your boss and say you’re leaving.
Is there a good or bad time to leave a job?
When is the best time to leave a job? Ask any boss and they’ll say never - but your exit strategy hinges entirely on understanding your motives and when to time it.
“You’re a quitter” - dealing with emotions, negativity and toxicity when you leave a job.
Leaving a job can be a traumatic experience. For all the achievement and positive progress made by accepting a new job you can feel both excited and adrift at the same time: unsure of how your current work colleagues will treat you, limited by a closing relationship with your workplace, work friends, mentors and customer or client base, and truly facing an unknown future
Counter Offer Mastery
The dreaded counter offer is universally derided as a bad thing to accept, and a bad thing to offer. But it can be incredibly hard to turn down if you’re unprepared for it’s inevitable offering, and unsure why they are offered in the first place.
For those at the business end of accepting a new job, a counter offer can be flattering, confusing, and guilt-inducing. Sales Recruiters Dallas are acutely aware of the methodology and psychology behind the counter offer: as you can see from the below blogs, we take counter offering very seriously!
The Boss Break Down - Why do bosses push the counter offer?
Expect the counter offer.
Whatever reason you give yourself for exiting a job and seeking new employment, your current employer may attempt to hold on to you.
Counter Offer Acceptance: Road to Career Ruin
As we’ve mentioned in other blogs in this series, a counter offer will always be delivered from a place of desperation from your manager, despite their best of intentions.
Counter offers are tools which reflect more on the lack of leadership or awareness from your manage than anything else, and they are most definitely not about you, the staff member. Counter offers are about your boss, and their ability to keep the operational status quo.
The damage of the Counter Offer
Is there any situation where a counter offer is in fact a good thing to do? Can It ever be offered in the spirit of fair opportunity? Is it as damaging as everyone says?
57% of staff accept a counter offer. That’s no small number of actively job seeking individuals. It’s also a lot of very unhappy employers who have had what they thought was a new employee pull the plug at the 11th hour.