I still remember my first QA placement.
I had been recruiting for just a few months, and was young enough to think that if we got someone an offer, the hard part was over.
I came across a Test Lead at Harris Teeter who was looking to make a move. My account manager had an opening at Lowe’s, so we submitted him. He got the offer. He accepted.
Then he asked me, “When should I put my notice in?”
I told him what my account manager had told me: right away because start date was 2 weeks out. So he did.
And this is where I learned a lesson I haven’t forgotten.
As he went through the client’s onboarding process, we discovered that there was a small piece of the client’s background requirement that we weren’t compliant with.
There was nothing bad on this guy’s record. But there was a requirement we hadn’t properly connected to his history before telling him to resign from his job.
We tried to get a waiver. It didn’t happen. And suddenly, this guy didn’t have a job anymore.
That was devastating for me. But obviously, it was much worse for him.
I had given him advice based on information I had been given without doing enough of my own due diligence. He trusted me, put in his notice, and ended up out of work and missing a couple months of paychecks.
I didn’t really know what to do. So I stayed in touch. Not in the way I would handle it today. I didn’t have the experience or the systems or the understanding I have now. I just knew that I didn’t want to disappear on him.
Eventually, I found him another opportunity at Wells Fargo. He was able to get through onboarding, get back to work, and eventually became an FTE and continued moving up the chain.
But I remember he gave me some candid feedback about how we had handled the situation and what we should have done differently.
I listened. And that experience changed the way I thought about recruiting.
My job wasn’t just to get someone an offer.
My job was to help them navigate everything between the offer and actually starting the job.
Because there are a lot of things that can happen in that space.
Background checks. Client approvals. Onboarding requirements. Start dates. Budget changes. Requisitions getting cancelled. Hiring managers changing their minds.
And, unfortunately, recruiters sometimes are not asking enough questions to management. So I started changing how I worked.
I became much more insistent that background checks and other major contingencies were completed before I recommended that someone give notice. Then I ran into other situations where a requisition was cancelled or a start date wasn’t as firm as we thought it was. So the process evolved again.
I wanted the background check completed. I wanted a tentative start date. I wanted to understand where we were in the client’s onboarding process. I started building relationships with the teams my candidates were joining before they got in the door whenever I could. The more buy-in we could create around the candidate, the better.
And when candidates had other interviews or opportunities in progress, I stopped telling them to shut everything else down just because they had an offer. I wanted them to keep the train moving until we were far enough through the process that I could confidently say, “Hey, we’re good. Let’s close this up.”
I’ve carried that philosophy with me ever since.
An offer is a milestone.
This is especially important in the current job market.
If you’re a candidate who gets an offer, I’m not necessarily telling you to stop applying or interviewing.
Quite the opposite.
Don’t take the other opportunities out of your pipeline until you know exactly what you’re holding.
Maybe you don’t apply to anything new. Maybe you decide the role you’ve been offered is exactly what you want.
But I wouldn’t recommend removing other opportunities from consideration until you’re confident that you’re actually going to start.
And that means asking questions. A lot of them.
I don’t mean that in a dismissive way. I mean that transparency is a two-way street.
For example, if you’re accepting a contract role, ask exactly what the contract means. If someone tells you it’s an “18-month contract,” ask whether it’s actually guaranteed for 18 months. Or is it a six-month contract that can be extended up to 18 months?
Those are two very different things.
Ask what happens at the end of the initial term. Ask who makes the decision to extend. Ask how often these assignments actually get extended. Understand what you’re signing up for.
Ask how well the staffing firm actually knows the client.
When a recruiter tells you, “We know this account,” that’s worth exploring.
How well? Have they placed people on this team before? Does the recruiter personally know the hiring manager? How long have they worked with the client? Can they connect you with someone on the team?
There is a big difference between a staffing company having a contract to do business and your recruiter having a strong relationship with the specific team you’re joining. The closer that relationship is, the more visibility your recruiter may have into what’s actually happening.
And if your recruiter really knows the account, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask them to help you understand the team you’re walking into.
You’re not just accepting a job. You’re making a decision about where you’re going to spend your time and how you’re going to make your money.
Don’t assume everything is done because someone said “offer.”
This is probably the biggest lesson I took from my first placement.
An offer can feel like the finish line. It isn’t.
There can still be a lot of moving pieces between “you got the job” and “you’re sitting at your new desk on Monday morning.”
My goal now is to protect the candidate and protect the process as much as I can.
I can’t control everything. But I can look at all the puzzle pieces and make sure I control the flow of information. We can communicate more clearly. We can make sure candidates understand what is confirmed and what is still contingent. And we can avoid telling someone to make an irreversible decision before we’re confident.
I wish I had known all of this when I made my first QA placement. I wish I had asked more questions. I wish I had understood that getting someone an offer was only part of my job.
But that candidate taught me something I’ll carry with me for the rest of my career:
Getting someone an offer is not the same thing as getting them safely to the other side of it.
And in a job market this difficult, candidates deserve recruiters who understand the difference.