Competing Offers - What To Do With Them

As someone who has been in the recruitment and headhunting business for a number of years, I am all too familiar with hiring processes and the dreaded Competing Offer. It’s not that a competing offer for candidates is bad (if anything it can be a good thing), but it is something one can find annoying to deal with. But if the developer you are working with receives an offer that is so good that they can’t turn it down, have you got the integrity as a headhunter to give impartial advice?

After being a headhunter for quite some time, there are often situations where the developer you are working with will get an offer that is honestly much better for them and their career, compared to the one you’ve provided. You’ve worked hard to land them an offer, but another company has decided that they can top that and extends an offer the developer can’t refuse. Annoying and a punch to the guts? Yes. Is it all bad? Not really, no. You have two ways of dealing with it at this point: try to pull heaven and earth together and convince them to take the offer you got for them, or maintain composure and wish them the best of luck on their journey.

In my professional opinion, the best thing one can do in a situation like this is the latter: maintain composure and wish the developer the best of luck on their new journey. By treating them with complete respect and understanding, it puts you as a headhunter in a good light as a professional and as a human in general. At the end of the day, you would and could be gaining a friend and professional contact for life. I can guarantee as the developer begins their new journey, the manner in which you handled yourself and the situation would not be forgotten. Why paint yourself in a bad light when you had the opportunity to paint yourself in a good light?

As a headhunter and recruiter, taking this same mentality and approach to all of your work will take you very far in your career. The more positive experiences you create on a daily basis, the more your reputation increases. Instead of you approaching developers and companies alike, they would be the ones approaching you instead. Treating the people you work with with the utmost respect is probably one of the most important parts of being a headhunter in the business.

I found that this simple act of practicing kindness and respect was missing in the recruitment industry when I first started out. After years of frustrating experience, I founded Revilo Recruitment on the foundations of respect, compassion and kindness. With that as the base of our business model and company mission, I am proud to say that we have been successful in all and everything that we do. We make sure that we treat each other and the developers/clients we work with with dignity and respect, and this has made all the difference in our company culture as well as in ourselves as individuals.