Thoughts on Offer Letters

Why should you not treat the final round of an interview as a binary outcome? Because your ability to negotiate the offer is predicated on your performance relative to the company’s true maximum budget.

When an offer is extended to you via phone call, it is usually an HR employee or hiring manager who is calling you to congratulate you and provide the high-level offer details (salary, benefits, potential start date, etc). And of course with any offer you receive, you should negotiate it. Say for example, you are calling back the hiring manager, she will have to contact someone in HR to see if the max budget can be pushed, assuming your ask is above that number. The amount of effort she puts into fighting for you is directly proportionate to how much you impressed her and the team in the final round (and whatever else you told her in your negotiation follow up call). She will write up a case to senior HR or whatever budgeting team she has to work with and highlight your x y z skills, explain you’re a super high in demand candidate with a b c offers, etc. Part of this process may involve soliciting feedback from other teams you interviewed with in your final round (ex. a team you might do projects for but won’t directly report into). If your offer discussions are with HR and you never interact with the hiring manager, you can be sure that HR will chat with the hiring manager to solicit further feedback even if HR will have to make its own case for increasing the budget. Either way, you want these people to fight as hard as they can for you, so treat the final round as a degree of success, not a binary outcome.

How to adopt this framework vs. simply acknowledging its fact. Assuming you agree with the points above, how do your preparations for interviews actually change in light of this?

1) Overprepare – especially for tangentially related job tasks. Say for example you are interviewing for a modeling/analytics position involving statistical model development that would be implemented via engineering team on a client’s homepage or platform. You should not only do your normal modeling preparation but also learn more about the engineering process that gets models live on the site. This means learning more about the process you have only partial purview into. You should command the interviews where you interview with the modeling team, but should also perform better than expected if they brought in an implementation engineer who could work alongside you. Impressing them in their own domain and being well read and capable of asking relevant questions is how you go beyond just doing well enough to get the engineer’s approval. Everyone will have a comparable situation at their job as nobody works in complete isolation (unless it’s a 1 person startup). Just see what else you can do and adjust yourself based on the types of people in your final round schedule. Cross functional teams often pull people from different teams that you may work with and these are the types of people you can always do more to impress.

2) Sending follow up emails to your interviewers. If you leave the final round thinking you got this 100%, you should still send follow ups. Perhaps you answered all of the technical questions correctly, and there wasn’t as much time for normal questions on the day to day or career evolution and overall corporate culture. This is the ideal follow up forum. Both you and the interviewers can benefit from learning more about each other in a less formal environment. As such, follow up emails provide a non-zero benefit to further humanize your candidacy and portray you as a more familiar partner to the team.

These tactics are used to educate interviewers to become more familiar with you and your work ability and both are fundamental in getting the relevant managers to vouch for your negotiation targets.