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Comment by felixdennis | Hacker News Reader

Thanks. How do you deal with this situation:

1. The candidate signed the 1. offer and 2. employment contract and backed out at the last minute 2. Rejection letters were sent to other applicants

Should employers always be on-guard of employees leaving at-will? On the slip-side, since employee can quit at anytime when a better offer shows up, should employer be able to fire any employee at-will when a better offer (cheaper and better candidate) shows up on the table?

I find this very tricky and lopsided. It appears that when company layoffs people to cut cost, they are labelled as evil. On the other hand, when employees jumpship when a better offer comes around, it becomes "it's the logical thing to do". This biased view doesn't seem to be very fair.

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Never reject good candidates outright. Call them. Let them know they weren't chosen for the role, but ask if you can invite them to apply for future roles that might be a good fit. That saves you in situations like this and feels much better for the very capable candidates you don't bring on board.

Thanks. I will do this in the future.

If it's lopsided, on average it's lopsided in the opposite direction: companies have massively more leverage than the average employee, and the damage to employees for no-justification layoffs is much larger, on average, than the damage to employers for no-justification resignations. Think of it from Google's perspective: if someone turns down a Google offer, even at the last minute, Google hardly cares. But if Google rescinds an offer at the last minute, it is a pretty big deal for the opposite party.

Between a startup and a prospective employee, things are more on a level of parity.

Thanks. It makes sense for the individual to take the Google offer because it would be a wise choice unless he has a huge stake in a startup that has a high chance of success.

The level of impact is higher for a startup compare to a big company because I've spent hours in posting job ads, interviewing, preparing contracts, going back and forth in negotiation, and so on.

> How do you deal with this situation:

You suck it up and move on.

> Should employers always be on-guard of employees leaving at-will? ... should employer be able to fire any employee at-will?

I live in Texas which is an at-will state. Of course we business owners are prepared and ideally so are the employees. Each state is different but, even if it's not an at-will state, you as a business owner need to prepare for replacing employees. Your comments imply that you think that the worse thing that could happen is that an employee decides to leave. That's crazy. What if you find out tomorrow that your employee has been posting source code on a P2P site? What happens if the employee has been found embezzling/stealing? Or what if said employee had a heart attack tomorrow? Or their spouse/child died and they needed an extended leave of absence? Those lost two are horrible situations, yes, but they are very real possibilities. You need to have training/policies/documentation in place to help with such. We spend no less than 2 hrs per month per person on maintaining/creating documentation.

See my other post in this thread for more details.

More than that - make the best of the situation, you now have a close aquaintance that works for Google. It's always good to know someone at google.

Companies should have some redundancy built in. Employee might have an accident (car/plane/etc.), and be unable to work at all. Business should be prepared to lose one or few employees.

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