Having never been in this enviable position before, I have no idea what the conventional wisdom is.
Company A made me a nice offer, I accepted, and am moving to the big city. Job starts in two weeks.
Company B, very near Company A, wants to interview me today via telephone.
Company B’s HR coordinator is aware that I’ve accepted another job, but she doesn’t know the details. She seems unfazed and has allowed the application process to proceed.
Both companies are of equal caliber, as are the positions. Pay for company B has yet to be discussed, but I think it’s probably in the same ballpark as company A.
That’s where it gets tricky. I won’t pre-burn my bridge with Company A for the same amount, or even $5k more. But $10k? $15k? That might change things.
But my career is fairly young; would my wisest move be to stay with my first offer no matter what? Or go ahead and interview, and shoot for the moon when Company B asks me what salary I require? My only negative thought about this option is that if Company B hires me, then has mass-layoffs and I try to get a job around the corner at Company A, my turnabout will be well-documented.
This may be academic; obviously the interview is merely step one. But the whole thing has my stomach churning a bit, so I thought I’d pose the question here.
Just so long as you make it known that you’ve already accepted a job with another company, if they want to do a phone interview, go for it. If you find that it unsettles you somewhat, then you need the experience of being in this sort of situation. Also, any company that has hiring practices that involve a delay between when they say they’re going to hire you and when you start working has to accept a certain number of people will walk away, given sufficient incentive. If they get pissy about it, you probably didn’t want to work for them anyway.
I would say you should take the interview. You’re not committing to anything, and if nothing else would give you valuable insight into a company you might apply with in the future.
I don’t agree with this. If you have accepted an offer (particularly in writing), then you have committed to joining that company. It would be in very bad form to accept an offer from another company.
You can go for the interview if you like, but if they make you an offer, you now have to decide whether you want to risk being considered a “flake”. The process of hiring is not all that cheap for a company. By giving them a headfake, not only do they lose out on all the expense they spent to hire you, but they also have to start over for the position you were to fill.
Company B in this scenario has nothing to lose by having you interview. So of course they will encourage you to interview, and will have no sympathy for the company that you reneg on your acceptance.
You can play all the interviewing and even bouncing off offers between rival companies PRIOR to accepting an offer. But once you’ve accepted an offer, you need to honor that agreement. (The fact that you did accept means that, although something better may come along, the offer in hand was agreeable to you).
I assume you accepted the first offer at least a couple weeks ago and have signed and returned the offer letter. I think it would be very unprofessional to ditch Company A and could hurt you in the future. Industries are smaller than you think and people move around. You may be burning more bridges than you’re aware of.
I think ethically you need to stay with Company A and maybe check with B down the road. My rule of thumb is barring a completely misleading job, try to stick it out for a year. Multiple jobs in a short timespan give me pause when reviewing resumes.
My gut feeling (literally) was in line with the advice of cormac262 and Ice Machine, so I very cordially cancelled the interview. I certainly could have gone through with the interview, but knowing that there was a zero percent chance that I’d accept the job, I figured this was the wisest tack.
This really struck a chord; I’m in the TV industry, and my career, as it were, has been a succession of jobs that were very dependent on the referrals of past and present colleagues who have bounced around the industry. Company B’s job was a rare bite from Monster.com, but the odds of me working there someday anyway, if I stay in TV, are pretty high.