Turning down an interview

NotAGolf

NotAGolf

NotAGolf

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A couple of days ago I was invited for an interview at a new company.

After finding out more about the role, and having been offered another role in the interim, I no longer want the job.

Do I:
A) Cancel the interview now.
B) Take the interview any and pull out later on (if successful)

Normally I'd go for option a) to avoid wasting my time and theirs. The thing I'm not sure about is I might want to work for this company at a later date, so I don't want to to damage my reputation. Which option would you go for?

For option b) I feel like I'd be wasting their time if I proceed, but if I was successful then perhaps I'd be 'on their radar' for future roles. But on the flip side, if I balls up the interview then maybe they wouldn't consider me in future.
 
If there is a slight chance you might be open to an offer then go with b, is the other role an internal one at your current company? If so definitely go and see what else is available.

Going to interviews even if you're not likely to want the job is still good practice, plus you get to gauge what you could make elsewhere. If you make a good impression but decline for another role then that's not necessarily bad, but you've given them a chance to make you an offer too and you've had a chance to meet them, which could help in future.

You never know. they might well surprise you with an offer that makes you change your mind, so I'd just go in with an open mind.
 
Cancel it and tell them why. Say you want to work for them. Phone them. Talk to HR, ask if it's okay to for them to email you their vacancies periodically. Ask for their email address.

If they don't, send them a couple of bump emails but then forget it.

Or just do it for practice and when they ask you if you have any questions, ask them about other roles.
 
I'd say b) is more of a waste of their time and more likely to damage your reputation, in the sense that you will have explicitly turned them down in favour of another opportunity when offered the job, which could be interpreted you have some doubts about them. However, there's a chance you could come across well and you never know the interview panel might move up through that organisation and be potentially interviewing for more senior roles in future that could be of more interested. So in summary, a) is a good neutral option, b) is slightly more risky but probably matters little in the grand scheme of things.

I recently withdrew from an interview process after 5 weeks and 4 interviews to accept another role I'd been offered in the interim. Part of me was tempted to just accept the other role and continue interviewing, but I couldn't really spare the mental energy /time what with a hectic situation in my prior job and my son having covid etc. To be honest, it's kind of their own fault as I'd warned their recruitment team a month earlier, they paid lip service to trying to get the interviews in a bit quicker but were just too slow overall. If you're taking over a month to interview for a non-senior position then there's a fair chance of candidates bailing on you.

Time prior to that I'd done one interview with another place and pulled out at that point to accept an offer.

Generally this scenario will happen a lot because you'll often have multiple job applications on the go in parallel.
 
inogen said:
Cancel it and tell them why. Say you want to work for them. Phone them. Talk to HR, ask if it's okay to for them to email you their vacancies periodically. Ask for their email address.
Click to expand...

But that does then beg some obvious questions... like why ask for future vacancies when there is a vacancy available now for him to interview for/discuss with them?

IF he's had an interview with them and been made an offer and the other place makes him a better offer which they can't match or better then that's understandable, perhaps they don't have budget/availability to match it or can't offer the sort of role he's after but maybe something opens up in future and he's someone they did previously want to hire.

It just seems odd not to go and have a chat with them and explore what is available there. Turning them down without even doing that or giving them the chance to make an offer/counter-offer or to perhaps look at changing the role or offering a different role etc... directly undermines the claim that he's interested in working with them.
 
I dunno. It would be annoying as an employer if someone persisted interviewing for job X when they don't want job X and had another more preferable offer on the table just because they might want another job there, because it is wasting the time of the people involved in that process that are trying to fill X. I once did a phone interview with a guy who had experience not that closely aligned to the job spec, when I asked him it became clear he really just wanted to work for my company and felt he could do a job in role X as a stepping stone to Y more aligned to his experience. I commended his gumption but ultimately didn't take it any further as he couldn't convince me that he actually wanted to do X which was what I needed. The key point was we established this at an early stage before any F2F interview and hence I didn't rule him out of future opportunities.

In terms of 'giving them the chance' to make an offer I guess the point is that he doesn't want the job so that's just wasting even more time, presumably this company wouldn't actually want that chance if they are just getting rejected, they'd rather focus their efforts on candidates interested in the job.

In terms of future opportunities/different roles... why do you have to interview for a job you don't want to express an interest in a company, you should be able to explain this as part of the discussion when withdrawing (expressing your interest in the company and enquiring about alternate roles). The reason you ask for future vacancies and not discuss the current vacancy is very simple, because you have learned more about the vacancy and determined it isn't the right fit for you. This is just a natural part of job applications, I certainly wouldn't mark someone down for withdrawing from a process, if anything I would consider it a good thing because it shows they are thinking hard about what they want to be doing rather than just going through the motions to grab whatever job is available.

I mean if you go through X stages of a process, and then right at the end, you go "so yeah, I don't actually want this role, have you got something else better suited to my desires?" I would be thinking why the hell didn't this get brought up sooner? You could maybe spin it somehow to indicate you are only turning it down based on something discussed in the final stage, but in my experience by that point you will already have been asked for feedback on what you think of the role, so would effectively have to go back on prior positivity.
 
HangTime said:
It would be annoying as an employer if someone persisted interviewing for job X when they don't want job X and had another more preferable offer on the table just because they might want another job there, because it is wasting the time of the people involved in that process that are trying to fill X.
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Job specs don't necessarily give the full picture so if he was interested enough to apply I don't see the harm in at least talking to them, he's not wasting anyone's time if there is a chance he'd accept an offer and he's clearly interested in working for that company.

Does he know the offer on the table is more preferable if he's not had an offer from them? He's not really clarified, sure if there is a salary range posted way below his current offer or the future roles he'd desire from this company would be in a completely different area then maybe it would be a waste of time but that isn't clear in the OP.

Employers don't necessarily post salary ranges because sometimes they could be quite broad, sometimes there might be more than one vacancy sometimes they're open to a broad range of candidates if they've got flexibility and he's keen to work in X area and/or a clear idea of where he could add value etc.. then he should perhaps talk to them.

HangTime said:
I mean if you go through X stages of a process, and then right at the end, you go "so yeah, I don't actually want this role, have you got something else better suited to my desires?" I would be thinking why the hell didn't this get brought up sooner?
Click to expand...

But that isn't what is being suggested here, the point was (in a situation of insufficient information) to talk to them about the role and find out more about it, see if it does offer the opportunity to do the sort of work he's interested in etc... Also having a rival offer is often good when it comes to job searching, it can speed up the process if another employer is interested in you and can result in a higher offer from them so I wouldn't worry about bringing that up.
 
I'm just taking what he's said at face value "After finding out more about the role, and having been offered another role in the interim, I no longer want the job.", I don't know how he did this but I assume this is more than just job spec.
If he hasn't explored it enough then fine, but why flat out say he doesn't want the job if that's the case, the way I read it was there's no chance he would accept an offer. That's the reason the offer on the table is more preferable, it's not a case of who is offering the best package, it is one job is desired and the other isn't, and hence a potential offer for the second job is irrelevant.

Yes, there might be more than one vacancy which is why I'm advocating bringing this up with them rather than interviewing for the role he doesn't want and slowing down that process - maybe it would then be too late, there could be another suitable role but he misses the boat and they close for new applications because of the delayed indication that'd he'd be interested in this alternate role and they've already progressed to an advanced stage with other candidates.

I really don't see bringing up interest in other vacancies prior to interview as a bad thing if you've determined the job applied for isn't the right fit, to me it shows more clarity of vision than going through multiple stages and then pulling out when you get an offer if you didn't want the job to begin with. Certainly I'd feel very comfortable explaining why I didn't want to interview for a vacancy for a role I have determined isn't the right fit, I've done this before after initial phone calls etc. There's also a slight risk you are considered a time-waster they might think twice about pursuing in future (I'm not saying you should be, but others might think that way) if you withdraw at offer stage but say you really want to work there.
 
Thanks for the feedback all. A brief update: I went for option a) in the end.

For context, the reason I turned it down was that both positions were advertised as a senior role, but one involved lots of line management responsibilities, whereas the other had none. Neither mentioned this in the job spec. I was honest with them and said that I'd rather a more hands on role, and seeing as the salary was the same for both roles, it was a no-brainer for me (I didn't tell them about the last part).
 
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