Should I Accept a Job Offer I'm Not Excited About? Use Data to Evaluate Each Opportunity and Decide

By Coach Chiao (George), author of Data-Driven Job Search · 閱讀中文版 →

The offer stage brings its own challenges

A job search is full of interview details, but the final goal is an offer. When you get your first one, how do you decide whether to accept it? If you have options, how do you make sure the offer won’t put you on a sinking ship? And if you’re asking yourself, “Should I accept a job offer I’m not excited about?”, how do you answer that?

In this article I’ll show you how to evaluate an offer with data so you can make a sound decision.

Common situations

“Should I keep looking for another offer?”
“I’m a bit worried about this company. Should I go?”
“The interview just ended and I got an offer right away. How do I decide?”
“I got an offer I don’t really like. Should I accept it?”
“The offer comes with some conditions. How should I handle them?”

These are challenges I hear all the time at the offer stage. (If your situation is a job you simply don’t want to do, I also wrote about whether to take a job you don’t really want.) Over two chapters, I’ll introduce “decision criteria” and the most important of them, constraints, so you can assess how well an offer fits where you are.

Decision criteria

Decision criteria are the things you weigh when you choose. From the Data-Driven Job Search point of view, we try to find ways to quantify them so we can compare.

For example, some people looking for jobs abroad care a lot about “the cost of being away from home.” You can simply calculate the time and money it takes to go home twice a year.

Others care about “team atmosphere.” You can ask how many onsites the team has each year (and how many people attend), how many new hires stay, how long current team members have been on the team on average, and so on.

The idea is to find “numbers you can refer to.” Some data may be hard to get. In that case, you can infer it from other data you can find.

Where decision criteria come from

Your own past experience. Maybe your last job had limited growth or opaque decision-making. These can become key considerations for your next job.
Other people’s experience. Maybe you heard a company has an obvious glass ceiling or poor work-life balance. That also affects your choice.
What comes with the offer. Terms in the offer, like salary and visa support, also affect your choice.

Why use decision criteria?

Quantifying makes comparison easier. We often struggle to decide because the choice is complex and the options aren’t on the same scale. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. But if we can quantify them, what’s left at the end is ranking our values.

When choosing an offer, many factors are hard to quantify. Putting them on the same scale with data helps you sort out value questions like “is salary or growth more important?”
It forces you to break the problem down. If you can’t decide, it’s usually because some key criteria aren’t clear yet.

Once you quantify them, you can see the impact of each one more clearly. The comparison eventually comes down to values (for example, family vs. income). If you get stuck, there’s often a value you haven’t clarified or put into words yet. When that happens, add another column.

How do you figure out your own decision criteria?

The simplest way is to “observe what you actually care about.” It’s part of getting to know yourself.

Decision criteria usually come from reflecting on your past, your hopes for the future or what you’re unhappy with now.

An easy way to start is to write, or talk it through with someone. Ask yourself “why do I kind of want to leave my current job?” Maybe the answer is “it’s too comfortable,” or “there’s no room to grow.”

Then ask yourself which specific events or observations make you feel it’s “too comfortable” or “no room to grow.”

You might say it feels too comfortable because people come in, eat breakfast, check stocks all morning, do a bit of work in the afternoon and then get ready to go home.

Or that the old-timers never leave, so it’s hard to get promoted into the roles above.

Next, try to quantify it. Maybe actual working hours are only five a day, or “only one person was promoted in the last three years.”

Once you’ve quantified it, I’ll then ask you: what’s the standard you’re hoping for?

For example, in a team of ten, at least one person gets promoted every year.

Or: the five hours of work are done properly, and another two hours can go to meaningful socializing (and then you can define what meaningful socializing is).

But I suggest that when you’re thinking about interviewing or changing jobs, you first think about what actions you can take right now to improve those numbers.

Then in interviews, especially when they ask “do you have any questions for us?”, try to collect this data.

Step by step

List why you want a change now
- What you’re happy with: which parts of the job satisfy you?
- What you’re unhappy with: which situations bother you?
- The life you want: what do you want your future work and life to look like?
Quantify the criteria and set a standard
- What you observe: for example, if your current workplace feels too comfortable, the data might be “only one person on the team was promoted in the last three years.”
- The standard: for example, “I want to join a team where at least one member is promoted every year.”

Dig up data to support the decision

In interviews or conversations with HR, you can ask directly for the data below, or collect it through Google, LinkedIn or Crunchbase:

Decision criterion	Data you can quantify
Future growth	Internal promotion rate, where past employees went after leaving, number of women leaders on the team
Team atmosphere	New hire retention on the team, recent examples of how conflict was handled, how the team communicates
Day-to-day work	Variety of daily tasks, number of internal and external teams to work with, number of clients to handle
Visa support	Whether the company offers visa support, how many current employees work on a visa

Should I accept a job offer I’m not excited about? How to decide

Once you’ve listed and quantified your decision criteria, ask yourself:

Do these criteria meet the standard I expect?
What can I do now to address the gaps?

Example

Say one of your criteria is team atmosphere: you want enough support and collaboration on the team.

You can ask these questions to collect data:

What’s the retention rate for new hires on the team?
How many formal meetings has the team had in the past three months? Are there other informal social activities?
How does the team lead handle disagreements?

With this data, you can judge whether the team meets your expectations.

Common decision criteria and how to quantify them

1. Future growth

Internal promotion. Where do people in the same role at this company get promoted to, and within how many years? Ask directly, or check on LinkedIn.
Where people go after leaving. What jobs do people in the same role at this company get elsewhere? Usually you check this on LinkedIn.

2. Team atmosphere

How the team communicates. Find out whether the team leans toward written communication, meetings or face-to-face collaboration. This reflects its collaboration culture.
Team activities. Ask how often the team has off-sites to understand how team members interact.

3. Day-to-day work

Daily tasks. Ask how many internal and external teams and clients you’d deal with each week, to understand how complex the work is.

4. Visa support

Visa status. Make sure the company can give you enough visa support, and ask how many employees currently use company-sponsored visas.

Conclusion

When deciding whether to accept an offer, try to quantify the things you care about. That makes it easier to compare the pros and cons of your options.

This way you can decide more rationally and completely, and find the opportunity that suits you best.