One Good Job Deserves Another

January 27, 2006 12:48 PM

How can my housemate turn down a job offer he's verbally accepted? So my housemate (not me...I wish) was offered a job this fall at Bank of America after doing an internship in cash equities sales there last summer. He verbally accepted it but hasn't submitted the signed contract yet. While he liked what he was doing he wasn't completely smitten, so this winter he interviewed for other jobs at various firms and today landed a job as a consultant at Bain. How can he gracefully get out of the BoA job without pissing too many people off or facing potential sanctions?

The contract he was to accept and submit technically expired in September, but he verbally accepted it and has been hemming and hawing every time they ask him to send it in. It doesn't specify anything about not accepting the offer.

He's (not completely seriously) thinking about saying that his mother/father/sister is sick so he needs to stay home and can't accept the job. He's also thinking about telling Bank of America that he has another offer to see if they'll escalate their original offer (not that more pay would make choose to stay).

What are the ethical and practical considerations in all of this? Could Bank of America somehow contact Bain and screw him over so he can't have either job? Sue him for breach of not-yet-fully-accepted contract? I would think they'd be pretty annoyed to have to find someone to replace him this late in the recruiting cycle.

I know that in the grand scheme of problems having to choose between two good jobs isn't exactly dire, but any input, including comparisons of the relative merits of Bain and Bank of America, would be appreciated.

posted by reflexed to work & money (30 comments total)

He has no contract with them. He can take any job he's offered. Any impression they've made about him is likely already colored by the fact that he left them hanging for several months, waiting to hear from him. All he has to do is say he's accepted a position elsewhere, and leave it at that.
posted by contessa at 12:53 PM on January 27, 2006

What are the ethical and practical considerations in all of this?

The ethical and practical thing to do would be: stop stalling, act like an adult, and tell BofA that he won't be working for them, right away.

Could Bank of America somehow contact Bain and screw him over so he can't have either job?

How would BofA know he got another job elsewhere? Why would your housemate tell them the details?

Sue him for breach of not-yet-fully-accepted contract?

Very very doubtful, especially since nothing has been signed.

I would think they'd be pretty annoyed to have to find someone to replace him this late in the recruiting cycle.

Sure, but that's not your housemate's problem. This kind of thing happens more than you might expect... until the new hire shows up on the first day of work, anything can (and does) happen.
posted by xil at 12:54 PM on January 27, 2006

Just tell him to contact BofA and decline the job offer. I've declined a number of offers over the years; it's never pleasant but the only ones who ever held it against me are the headhunters who missed out on their commission of 20-25% of my yearly salary.

There are no ethical or practical considerations here. People are under no obligation to accept job offers.
posted by EiderDuck at 1:00 PM on January 27, 2006

I worked at Bain (now, no longer in consulting). The jobs seem very different--Bain consulting is not a sales job until you're a partner, at Bain he'll be working with super-smart type A competitive people that work ALL the time but try to hide it (BOA may be this way too, I have no idea), and probably will learn much more about different business at Bain. Bain is very intense and the turnover is tremendously high, I think like 25% of the total employes base leaves every year, at least when I worked there about 8 years ago. I also assume that Bain pays more.

At Bain I talked with several people that were in this type of situation but reversed--they worked at Bain, secretly looked for other employment, verbally accepted, and then reported to their manager that they were leaving. Often, these situations involved people wanting to transfer to different offices (i.e. moving from the New York office to the SF office) and being strung along for a long time and told that Bain couldn't work it out. They would look for a different job in their target city. When they got other offers and said they were leaving, the story almost always suddenly changed and they were told that they could transfer offices soon. When they protested that they had already verbally accepted the other offer, the response was, 'Don't worry about it. This sort of thing happens in business all the time. You haven't signed anything.'

I would really strive to avoid breaking my word to a friend or someone I was personally dealing with, but a corporation's not a person. You'll have to make an ethical determination yourself, but I think if BOA made a verbal agreement to your friend and then changed its mind short of signing something, they would not hesitate to back out. I actually went through something like this myself--I was contracted to spend the summer in Boston doing freelance work for a company, I had set up a sublet and bought my ticket, and they called me 2 weeks before and said that they weren't doing as well as they thought and decided to cancel the project, so they couldn't hire me. They reimbursed me for my plane ticket, but I had turned down several other offers to take that job, and they didn't seem to feel ethically challenged by the situation.
posted by underwater at 1:04 PM on January 27, 2006

Call and/or write them and say something along the lines of "Thank you for the offer, but I have accepted another position at this time. I wish you well in your search for a suitable canidate" Do it sooner, rather than later. Don't lie about a sick relative. Simple.
posted by raedyn at 1:05 PM on January 27, 2006

I think you should save this thread and come back to it when both you are your friend are about ten years older. You can have a really good laugh over a few beers about how you gave a shit about BofA's feelings once you've been through the corporate ringer a few times. Tell your friend to sack up and let BofA find another candidate. At the level you are talkikng about, turnover and job shuffling are a given. There are zero ethical considerations here.
posted by spicynuts at 1:17 PM on January 27, 2006

reflexed posted "How can he gracefully get out of the BoA job without pissing too many people off or facing potential sanctions?"

Simple. Call B of A immediately and tell them that he has chosen to decline their offer. Apologize for taking so long to get back to them. Don't offer an explanation as to why. If they ask (and they might, but they might not), tell them you'd rather not go into details. Most importantly, thank them for their time and for their offer. If they sound like they're going to counteroffer, politely decline, and tell them they'd be wasting their time. Be firm, but polite.

A verbal agreement with a corporation the size of B of A is worth exactly the paper it's printed on. This sort of thing happens all the time.
posted by toxic at 1:17 PM on January 27, 2006

You're looking at this personally. BofA is not going to cry tears of painful rejection over this. I'm sure your housemate is very nice and all, but a large corporate financial conglomerate will neither collapse nor bring down the mighty firepower of a thousand lawyers if he bails.

Anymore, I'm shocked if new hires actually show up their first day. I've stopped creating user accounts until someone can produce an actual body. There was probably someone somewhere looking forward to dumping work on your housemate, but it'll dump all the same on somebody else.
posted by Lyn Never at 1:27 PM on January 27, 2006

I think your friend or you may be overestimating how seriously BofA will take this. Most likely his potential boss will be a little disappointed and/or annoyed that he will have to go to the trouble of finding somebody else. On the off chance that he's not already looking. Seriously, this is not a big deal and happens all the time. He should just tell him that he's accepted another offer and say something nice about his experience there.

The BofA job sounds like a pretty standard early morning-to-5 (though I didn't realize they had internships for that kind of thing).

I have been involved in an atypical way with the consulting industry in New York, and Bain has a very good reputation. However, my impression is that long hours and hard work are pretty standard in the industry, and it's certainly possible that Bain maintains its reputation by working harder and for even longer hours.

These seem like really different jobs and basically I think it comes down to whether your friend wants to do equity sales or management consulting (for now).
posted by lackutrol at 1:30 PM on January 27, 2006

I accepted a job once and had to turn it down later when a better opportunity came along. I just called them right away and was honest yet polite. It was the right thing I had to do for me, and the hiring manager understood it.

Personally, I wish your friend hadn't led them along, but no signed contract = no problem. They do not own him.

My dad hired and fired people for years and he always said "We make our decision first, and then it's your decision if you want to work for us or not." This isn't the first time the company has had this happen, of that I'm sure.
posted by GaelFC at 1:33 PM on January 27, 2006

If it's not patently obvious by this point, your friend should tell BofA immediately that he's taking another job. According to Yahoo!, BofA has 176,638 employees. They couldn't possibly care less if they don't fill this position unless your friend was to be hired as the CFO or something.

But as a general ethical principle, it's just rude to leave an employer hanging when you know you're not going to take the job. I've been on the employer end of this (not for a conglomerate like BofA), and while it's a little annoying that a candidate would interview for a different job after accepting an offer verbally, it's a real PITA to be left hanging for months.

And worrying about a lawsuit is just silly. What exectly are the damages? We're not talking about an irreplacable cog in the engine that makes the company turn.
posted by fochsenhirt at 1:53 PM on January 27, 2006

BofA already knows. If he's been hemming and hawing, the hiring manager already has a feeling he's gonna bail. Just do it.
posted by selfmedicating at 2:03 PM on January 27, 2006

Honestly, I'm amazed that BoA is still waiting for him. Every professional job I've ever had, they wanted me to start right after accepting their agreement (Usually they didn't even want me to give two weeks at my current job), so I couldn't accept another offer during the time in between.

If they weren't in a hurry to hire him, they'll be able to get along without him.
posted by Gamblor at 2:08 PM on January 27, 2006

I strongly, strongly recommend against lying to get out of the BofA offer. The finance and consulting worlds are very small and chummy and you never know who knows who. Lying to one firm to take a position at another is a serious breach of integrity and among the big firms, can follow an individual through their career. If found out, BofA will look like they got suckered into a cheap lie and Bain has a new employee with questionable integrity.

On the other hand turnover is a regular occurrence. Tell your roommate to contact BofA and let them know he's secured an opportunity elsewhere that's a better fit for his skills and career goals. There's a huge mob of graduates banging on BofA's door so there's no need to worry about their ability to fill the position.
posted by junesix at 2:15 PM on January 27, 2006

(I was also confused as to why they've let it hang this long... he's not wokring there at the moment, is he? Because that would change the answer)
posted by raedyn at 2:25 PM on January 27, 2006

I have this hilarious image in my head of a BofA hiring manager reading an "I've accepted a job elsewhere" letter, and a single tear running down his cheek...

That being said, there's a general business rule that definitely applies here: If it's not on paper, it never happened. That being said, the "right" thing to do is to contact BofA and tell them, "I have accepted another job offer." That's all that needs to be done.
posted by CrayDrygu at 2:42 PM on January 27, 2006

The comment above about looking back and laughing in 10 years was right on. After you've gone through a few rounds of being verbally told you were going to get a job and then having it disappear out from under you, you'll realize the truth of the old adage that "a verbal agreement isn't worth the paper it's written on."
posted by matildaben at 2:53 PM on January 27, 2006

Honestly, I'm amazed that BoA is still waiting for him. Every professional job I've ever had, they wanted me to start right after accepting their agreement (Usually they didn't even want me to give two weeks at my current job), so I couldn't accept another offer during the time in between.

Yeah, and I want a pony. *shrug* Of course any hiring manager is going to do what's best for them and hang any other considerations. If they have a use for you immediately they'll push for right away. However in most cases they'll take you when you can come, and that goes double a thousand times more for organizations the size of BoA.

a quick google turns up this:

With over 400 sales professionals in 30 different locations, Cash Equities can offer clients a fully integrated service, combining global and regional perspectives.

That's Deutche Bank, who had 65,000 employees in 2004. Bank of America had 175,000.

BoA probably is in the process of hiring a dozen people for that job at any given second. They don't give a ratfuck about your buddy.
posted by phearlez at 3:09 PM on January 27, 2006

I would echo what everyone else is saying:

1. call now
2. don't give them any BS about sick parents, that won't help anything
3. BofA can't do anything, they didn't have a contract with your roommate.

Your roommate may also want to make it clear that he liked working at BofA, and would be happy to consider working at BofA sometime in the future.

By way of explanation, your roommate may also want to explain that he feels that management consulting is the right career for him at this point, so he feels that it is in the best interest of both BofA and himself to decline the BofA job.
posted by b1tr0t at 3:17 PM on January 27, 2006

CrayDrygu: If it's not on paper, it never happened.

Exactly.

Your roommate should chill out, sack up, and call BoA. He doesn't need to explain anything, doesn't need to go to the trouble of lying; he just needs to say "I've decided not to accept the offer after all."

They'll say "Okay, thanks for calling," and that'll be the end of it. They have better things to do than try to fuck him over—namely, actually filling that position.
posted by S.C. at 3:43 PM on January 27, 2006

You'll have to make an ethical determination yourself, but I think if BOA made a verbal agreement to your friend and then changed its mind short of signing something, they would not hesitate to back out.

This is very much the truth -- it's happened to me twice. Granted, the first time was the corner Dairy Queen when I was 16 and I didn't lose a lot of sleep over it, but the second time involved 50 grand plus stock options and I got kindof grumpy. In both cases, there was no written offer, just a verbal agreement, and management changed in the period of time between when I interviewed favorably and when I was supposed to start.
posted by weston at 4:37 PM on January 27, 2006

Thanks a lot for your input everyone. BofA didn't have my friend start immediately because he's still a graduate student and doesn't finish until June.

He's going to call BofA first thing Monday morning, and like toxic, junesix and many others suggested, he's going to politely decline the offer without going into detail as to why.

Thanks again. I guess we will understand all this better after've got a couple years in the corporate world under our belts. Cheers.
posted by reflexed at 4:48 PM on January 27, 2006

In the bad times, the banks will lay you off. In the good times, you lay the banks off.
posted by mullacc at 7:05 PM on January 27, 2006

Oh, man. Judging from what I've seen of Bain's corporate library, if your roomie isn't willing to Step Up, Bain will eat him alive.

But, yeah, BoA has been of a mad hiring streak of late and they will not miss him if he calls up with a simple "Sorry, I've been offered a job elsewhere." If he can make it through the first year, he'll be much better off with some Bain-ing than some BoA-ing on his resume.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:22 PM on January 27, 2006

If "cash equity sales" is anything like "equity sales," your housemate is in the process of turning down 55-hour weeks for 85-hour weeks.

I'm guessing that your roommate is an MBA student, and I don't think that many posters here understand that (while of course BofA won't shed a tear) what housemate is doing might be a big deal. It is not common practice to intern, take the full-time offer, and then renege. Career Services at his school (though powerless) will be a pain in the ass, dude will never be able to work for BofA again, and if he decides to go back into research, or sales, or trading, there's a nonzero risk that whoever he interviews with at another bank will either conclude that his internship didn't work out, or call his MBA classmate (who's now a VP or MD at BofA) and check his references, at which time he'll be pegged as an untrustworthy.

Wall Street is a smaller place than it seems, and the world of equity sales isn't nearly as big as the world of investment bankers.

All I'm saying is that your buddy's gotta do what he's gotta do, quickly and honestly. Though I don't doubt that he's doing the right thing, I wouldn't pretend that such a maneuver is guaranteed to have no consequences.
posted by Kwantsar at 9:57 PM on January 27, 2006

I think you should save this thread and come back to it when both you are your friend are about ten years older.

Not to minimize your housemate's situation, reflexed, but this reminded me of my first job. My father forced me to get a job at McDonalds a month before I was leaving to go to college. I ruminated the entire time about telling them I would be leaving so soon after starting. When I finally had to go I was shocked at how non-plused the manager was when I told him.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 5:53 AM on January 28, 2006

Believe me if your friend thinks he may at some point want to do anything other then equity sales taking Bain job even at the expense of pissing off some salesguy is worthwhile. If I saw a guy's resume that said equity sales internship, Bain as first post-MBA job I wouldn't really care if the equity sales guys bad mouthed him.

To be honest though junior equity salesman is on my list of worst job in the world so I'm biased.
posted by JPD at 7:50 AM on January 28, 2006

JPD--

This thread is dead now, and I've never worked in equity sales, but I think you're way off-base. The best equity salesmen understand everything that their bank's research department has produced, and they can explain the equity story (whether it's valuation, catalyst, growth, etc.) to the buyside and drive revenue for the bank. You may think the job sucks, but the best equity salesmen in the world aren't "sales guys," they are analysts in salesmen's clothing.

I'd also bet that the 90th percentile of equity sales owns twice as much as the 90th percentile of MCs. He's not turning BofA down for McKinsey, after all.

In other words, your point is valid, but it's not as strong as you are making it out to be.
posted by Kwantsar at 1:34 AM on January 29, 2006

Its dead - but notice I said Junior Equity Sales. Not Equity Sales. A junior equity salespersons job is to set up meetings and send out reports.

Also I think you overstate the quality of most equity sales guys - by a huge margin actually. Of course there are a few salesmen who are fantastic resources.

I will tell you something I absolutely am sure of - a lot of very good buy-side shops would hire an ex-MC before they would hire a ex-Sales guy for an investment role.
posted by JPD at 4:24 PM on January 30, 2006

I agree with Kwantsar if you sub equity for fixed income. I'm always impressed with the fixed income staff.
posted by mullacc at 9:59 PM on January 30, 2006