so you made through the big interviewing process and now you're waiting for the offer but you wait and wait and wait and it just seems to take forever so question is why does it take so long for those offers that come through we'll stick around in this video i'm going to demystify that whole process hey everybody it's brian from life after layoff and today i want to demystify the offer process by pulling the curtain back and showing you a little bit of the behind-the-scenes workings of talent acquisition and the human resources departments with regard to the offers and as a corporate recruiter with over 20 years of experience interviewing and hiring thousands of people into some of the world's largest and most well-known companies i do know a thing or two about the offer process but before we get too far into it if you're interested in more videos just like this one directly from a corporate recruiter i would encourage you to hit that subscribe button because that really does help support the channel and also ensures that you won't miss a single post okay so i'm sure that you've all been through this scenario where you go through a long and arduous interviewing process where you meet with countless stakeholders and you know that you just aced it and then you get a call from the recruiter at the end of it saying hey the team was really impressed we're ready to move on to offer then you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait some more and you start wondering why the heck is it taking so long to get this offer in some cases weeks will go by first reason is is that there is an approval process so when you go through the interview at the end of it the recruiter sits down with all the different stakeholders who interviewed you and they go through what's called a debrief meeting at the end of that debrief each stakeholder who interviewed you is going to give you either a thumbs up or a thumbs down as far as whether or not they want to move to offer and if we get near unanimous consensus then we go through and start the offer process so then what happens is the human resource department or the talent acquisition group starts to pull offer details so they'll look at what notes they had from your preliminary interview with the recruiter about what you said your compensation expectation was they'll then look at local market wage surveys or wage data for what the industry is paying they'll also look at their internal salary bands and there's usually a min emit in a max or a 25th percentile a 50th percentile and then a 75th percentile and most people they want to keep at 50 percentile or below to keep internal equity and to allow you to continue to get increases as long as you're inside that salary ban because if you came in at the top end of the range you wouldn't get any raise at all and how many people are going to stick around if you go through two or three years without getting a merit increase because you're just at the top end of the range already now i will say this is for large companies smaller companies may handle it slightly different but for large companies this is what they typically would do and the last thing to look at is internal comparators which is other people that are in similar roles in that organization and that's where they'll start to come up with a number so if your salary expectation is higher than the average person in that role the company then has to make some strategic decisions on how much they can offer you or if there's a creative way that they can come up with a more compelling offer for you that doesn't stretch the rest of the group because there are candidates who come in with salary expectations that are 20 30 000 higher than the rest of the group and they might have less experience and less skill you could obviously imagine the kind of issues that that might cause for the rest of the group so the human resources department and the hiring manager will sit together and figure all that out and my role with the corporate recruiter is to advocate for the candidate's sake as well to ensure that whatever we come up with is going to likely get a deal done so once we have that information and we come up with the offer then it goes through an approval process and that's usually three or four layers of approvals and the first one is usually the hiring manager then it's usually the hiring manager plus one so it'll be the hiring manager plus the hiring manager's boss and then there's usually a human resources approval on there somewhere it's usually an hr business partner that's separate from the talent acquisition group and in some cases the recruiting team or the um the talent acquisition team may have final approval but usually it's to then move it to actually presenting the offer so then the recruiter will create the offer letter and then they'll go and contact you and present the offer and go through that whole negotiation process and that process even if it's smooth is generally taking at least a week potentially even more and if the salary expectation is too much of a stretch for the salary band that it's currently in then the human resource department may sit down with the hiring manager and then determine whether or not they want to enrich the role so if you are somebody that is coming in and you're stretching the salary band it is something to think about because the companies who are feeling like they're stretching to get you now are going to expect even more from you so that's why it's important to target the properly scoped role for your current level of experience because if you move into a role that's below your level of expectation you're just going to set yourself up for failure but the next thing that can slow down an offer is if all the approvers that are needed on the approval chain are not available then we have to wait for people if they're on vacation or maybe they're in business meetings for the week and it's hard for them to step out and go and do the approval so to a degree we're at the mercy of the approvers in order to get that offer done quickly there also have been some times where the senior manager is not fully aligned with what the hiring manager is thinking so the hiring manager may have a certain idea on the type of profile that they want to hire into their group the senior manager steps in at the last minute says actually let's re-scope this and really think about what we're trying to accomplish here and then suddenly the offer that was on its way through approval is comes to a screeching halt doesn't mean that you won't get the offer at the end of the day but it means that they are rescuing the role or maybe scrutinizing it a little closer taking it a step further there are times where we go to offer and somebody in the process says actually we want to see a full slate of candidates so maybe there's a candidate that we know we want to fast track through a process and we are even pre-identified we get to the point of making offer and then suddenly somebody says actually let's look at a whole slate of candidates so that requires recruiting time you know there's several weeks of recruiting time and all this stuff um that can happen and really slow things down generally speaking when that happens if we have a candidate that we really like i do usually push back on the hiring manager to say hey listen we usually only have a certain amount of time where a candidate is actively engaged and that's usually two to three weeks and if it takes much longer than that the candidate's interest wanes other companies come in they move off and they're no longer an active candidate but there are hiring managers that are adamant about single full slated candidates and that can take some time and of course there's also process bloat and depending on the company that is providing the offer there may be a lot of extra steps that are needed behind the scenes that are more administrative or procedural that could potentially slow down the process and that can be a lot of different things from software systems that are slow and cumbersome to steps in a process for checks and balances or auditing process bloat and process creep i guess you could call it does happen and it is a real thing finally let's be honest there are some times where the recruitment team is slow the recruiter doesn't get to things quickly enough the hiring manager forgets about the offer or doesn't go in and approve the offer quick enough the human resources team doesn't get information back to the recruitment team quick enough you're basically waiting on a lot of moving parts and so slowness to act inattentiveness and even overloaded recruiters and hiring managers who have other jobs other wrecks they're looking to fill and this position just gets kind of buried a little bit in their priority list but either way it's not good candidate experience when these offers take so long and it is a big frustration with most recruiters i don't think i've met a single recruiter out there who enjoys a long process to get you an offer in hand we want to get those jobs filled so we can move on to the next one so hopefully this gives you a little bit more insight into the inner workings of the offer process and maybe demystifies things if you're in a situation where you're waiting on an offer and it's taking a long time i would certainly nudge the hiring team in particular the recruiter and say hey just checking to see what's going on with this offer do you have a time frame and don't feel bad about checking in once every two or three days because the recruiter does have a sense of urgency to try to get it approved so that they can get it into your hands so that you can accept it and again you can get that rec filled so hopefully this helps if you're somebody that is not getting the offer that is actually something that i specialize in i've got a website called a lifeafterlayoff.com it's loaded with tips and tricks all from an insider's perspective and i share my deepest and most intimate knowledge in the form of a couple of training courses the first one is called resume rocket fuel it is designed to teach you exactly how to write a resume that is going to give you the best chance of getting noticed by that recruiter to land that first interview and once you land that first interview it's up to you to sell yourself throughout the rest of the process to ultimately land that offer that hopefully won't take too long and that's where the ultimate job seeker boot camp comes in so if you're struggling in your job search i highly suggest that you check those training courses out appreciate you watching happy job hunting hopefully your offer is not taking too long and we will see you on the next one