Hacker News Reader

Comment by edmccard | Hacker News Reader

>Whenever I've offered an exploding offer in the past, it's because I had several candidates: an extremely strong candidate and several strong but somewhat weaker candidates.

If you had several candidates of equal ability, would you still use an exploding offer? Otherwise, it seems to be less about "giving candidates an answer within a certain timeframe" and more about putting pressure on the candidate you really want.

>there's a risk of losing all candidates if I waited for an indefinite time on the strongest candidate.

Is there nothing in between an exploding short-term offer and an indefinite open-ended offer?

View on HN

If you had several candidates of equal ability, would you still use an exploding offer?

I would think you would. If you have 10 candidates but only want to hire 1, you can only issue one offer at a time regardless the fact that all 10 are equally qualified. While the first candidate would love to have all the time in the world to contemplate the offer, the employer and the other 9 candidates who are waiting in line don't want that.

>the other 9 candidates who are waiting in line don't want that [to wait for the first candidate to contemplate the offer]

If any of them have other offers, they might appreciate _some_ extra time to decide between them.

EDIT: Nevermind the previous bit--I was still thinking in the context of multiple simultaneous offers, which I guess is not a thing.

And if not, then if the first choice turns it down, you make an exploding offer to the second (to be fair to the next 8), and again to the third (to be fair to the next 7), etc. Is there ever a situation where an exploding offer is not in everyone's best interest?

> And if not, then if the first choice turns it down, you make an exploding offer to the second (to be fair to the next 8), and again to the third (to be fair to the next 7), etc. Is there ever a situation where an exploding offer is not in everyone's best interest?

The ideal scenario would be if it were socially acceptable to rescind offers—thus making the exploding offer unnecessary. An employer could make offers to everyone they're interested in, see who accepts, and then stay with them (essentially, allow parallel analysis on both sides). Instead, candidates can have multiple simultaneous offers while companies can only make offers sequentially. Hence the exploding offers.

A rescindable offer worse than a deadline, because the deadline is unpredictable.

> If you had several candidates of equal ability, would you still use an exploding offer?

1) yes 2) I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I had multiple candidates without any preference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com