Analysis Paralysis – Are you overthinking multiple job offers and struggling to make a decision? How can you go about accepting an offer and rejecting another one?

You can have multiple offers and get confused on how to rate them. You can rate an offer on money, travel time, career progression – the list is never-ending, and each one can lead you further down a rabbit hole, causing more paralysis by analysis. So, what is the one thing that can really make a difference to help one job offer stand out from the others in your decision-making process?

Culture

What is hard to rate is the culture because you don’t know it. One of the things that happens a lot during the interview process is that people get interviewed by people they’re not going to work with. It’s usually the Ops Manager or the GM who gives you a taste of the business, but it doesn’t give an insight into the day-to-day.

The reality is that if you don’t have a good connection with the person to who you’ll be reporting, then it’s best to move on because that’s whom you’re going to be spending your time with and if you don’t feel positive when meeting them, then it’s not going to work long term no matter how well the rest of the job stacks up. The problem is, quite often, as you progress through the interview process, you’ll meet more senior people further up the chain, and you’re then even further removed from who you’ll be working with.

So, how do I get to meet who I’ll be working with?

As a candidate, you can ask, for example to meet with who will be your direct manager in the second interview. Especially in our current market, you could ask to have a half-hour meeting with your direct manager or members of your team. Most of the time, employers are willing to accommodate this. You will want to know who your manager is and if you can work with them. The only way to raise the topic is to literally ask. You’ll find that if you ask, it ends up happening most times. You’ll also find that it shows you are keen and can make you stand out from the crowd.

This can work as a great way to figure out how to separate offers or separate how you feel about companies – asking to meet with who you’ll be working directly for can become the most important factor amongst other factors.

Summary

Overall, the above strategy is a better way to have the right expectations. So, in terms of assessing companies, this is probably one of the biggest things – trying to make sure that your expectations align with theirs and then judging it against the criteria you have for moving on. And that brings us back to another point we made a few weeks ago – that it’s also important to be clear on why you want to move on from your current employer.

Looking for your next construction job? Search our current construction roles here, or to chat to our team about securing your next opportunity, get in contact with us through our Contact Us page.

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