By Betsy Davies – Associate Director of Employer Engagement and Career Advocacy
SUMMARY: Allowing graduating students sufficient time to evaluate, compare, and accept full-time job offers is vital to a healthy recruiting process. Employers who offer reasonable timelines are more likely to secure top talent and reduce the chances of candidates reneging on offers.
One of the highlights of the work I do here in the Engineering Career and Co-op Center is meet with graduating engineering and computer science students to evaluate their full-time job offers. That came about organically as more and more seniors sought out guidance on navigating the offer process.
Employers are often surprised – sometimes pleasantly so – to learn that a job offer evaluation appointment doesn’t always end in advice to negotiate for more money. Evaluating a job offer or offers involves spending about an hour in my office to talk about the benefits, the cost of living in the future city, to talk about budgeting for life outside of college, and more. I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing, evaluating, and comparing multiple job offers. (Shameless plug: I am always happy to discuss the trends our students are seeing from their job offers.) I’ve seen well thought-out and well-presented offer packages, and I’ve seen offer packages that didn’t include any information about benefits. In the latter situations, employers were surprised that graduating students were asking to see a comprehensive summary of the benefits offered for a full-time role.
TIP TO EMPLOYERS: Please don’t be surprised that someone about to join your full-time talent pool wants information about the benefits. Have a comprehensive summary with rates for health insurance premiums, retirement matching, etc.
By far the biggest frustration I experience alongside my students is employers’ failure to value the students’ time in this process. A phrase I use often in frank discussion with employers is “the kind of students you want are absolutely applying to multiple positions and they need time to complete that process.” Understandably, no recruiting team likes to hear that their preferred candidate is in talks with another employer. But if you believe in the work your organization does and the opportunity you offer, you must allow students to complete a thorough search process.
But what does a thorough search process look like? What does allowing students time mean to an employer? I ask students these questions:
- When is the start date for this job?
- Do you start tomorrow? In three months? Six months? Nine months?
- Do you need security clearance?
If the answer is “no” to security clearance and “no” to an immediate or near-term start date, then I advocate for students’ taking the time to make well-explored and thorough decisions. Why? Because this is the beginning of their full-time careers. These are not full-time, seasoned members of the workforce moving from one position to another. These are talented students with strong experience and qualifications preparing to complete their academic journey. And their time to evaluate offers is valuable.
TIP TO EMPLOYERS: Competitive, talented students – the kinds of students you want to hire – are not applying to just one job and hoping for the best. Our office would never advise them to do so. Instead, we encourage them to explore all possibilities during their full-time job search. The very fact that these students are taking the time to ask thorough questions and navigate a well-explored search should confirm that they ARE the kinds of students you want on your team.
For the past two summers, we have benchmarked offer timeline recommendations from NACE 1 and from our peer institutions’ colleges of engineering and computer science. The common factor in the guidelines is to allow students a reasonable amount of time to evaluate offers – reasonable by collegiate standards not by veteran workforce standards. It ensures students are not pressured into accepting offers and lowers the chance of students reneging.
Recruiting is expensive – a great deal of time and energy is expended by employers to ensure the best possible candidates are added to your respective talent pools. Your time is valuable. We convey that message to students, but we also convey that their time is valuable, too. We encourage you to consider reviewing our Employer Offer Guidelines as you send out offers this fall. For some, these timeline recommendations will feel uncomfortable. For others, these will line up with what your team already puts into action.
TIP TO EMPLOYERS: If your team currently has short offer acceptance deadlines and you experience a high number of students reneging (and number is too high), it may be worth examining our guidelines. Your team may not be able to shift the offer acceptance deadline culture overnight, but you can lengthen the window and grant extensions to students when they ask.
If you want to explore what it looks like from our side of the desk? Set up an employer engagement appointment with me. The employer partners who have done so have begun conversations that have benefited their recruiting process and our students.
1 “NACE Advisory Opinion: Setting Reasonable Deadlines For Job Offers” says in its opening sentence that “Experience shows the best employment decisions for both students and employers are those that are made without pressure and with the greatest amount of information and transparency. Students given sufficient time to attend career fairs, participate in on-campus interviews, and/or complete the interviewing in which they are currently engaged are more likely to make good long-term employment decisions and may be less likely to renege on job acceptances.”
