Long story short – very skilled guy in my company decided a couple of months back to look for a new job due to issues with prior manager.
He received an offer, accepted it but in the intervening period has been working with my team and really enjoying it and is now regretting his choice to leave.
Obviously canceling offers is more common outside of Japan but in this persons case he has an ultra domestic mindset and feels consigned to his fate because to do otherwise at this stage would result in him losing face.
A few questions:
1) Are there any legal issues for that individual were he to rescind the offer letter although he was planning to start first of November?
2) Could a recruiter help cancel this for him?
3) My company’s HR said they won’t get involved to do anything – could there be some issue if my company were to get involved?
Thank you for your advice!
6 comments
> 1) Are there any legal issues for that individual were he to rescind the offer letter although he was planning to start first of November?
Depends if he’s signed off on the actual contract or not – in theory he could be sued if he’s contracted. Even if he has, the company is very unlikely to do anything, as they wouldn’t be able to prove much in the way of damages.
> 2) Could a recruiter help cancel this for him?
No, and he would find that that recruiting company wouldn’t want anything to do with him again. Remember, the recruiter doesn’t make anything if they don’t actually place the candidate. No commission for an “almost”.
Have you considered he may be telling you he wants to stay but feels compelled to leave as a way of saving face with you? Perhaps he still wants to go.
To start, he may just be having an emotional response to leaving. Once you’ve made a choice and everyone knows you’re going general consensus is you shouldn’t stay even if there is a counter offer.
That aside, I agree with the other poster that if he signed a contract, there is contractual issue but only to the extent that the other company wants to pursue that (which I doubt they would because it would cause them an expense + they’d get an employee that doesn’t want to be there etc.).
Regarding the recruiter, this is going to make him/her look very bad and the recruiter will not get a commission. The next time that recruiter brings a candidate to that company, what do you think HR is going to say? The next time HR evaluates the recruitment companies that have successfully provided candidates, how is that going look? So the motivation for the recruiter is to get this person successfully on-boarded.
Has his current company done anything at all to “encourage” the poor chap to stay?
Have they tried to buy his loyalty with a generous raise, for example?
Of course, if they only offer a generous raise like reactionary running dogs *after* they already know that he has received a much better offer from another company, then it is a guaranteed indicator that they did not truly value him as en employee and human being in the first place.
He should not have told the HRE Manager where he was leaving to.
>because to do otherwise at this stage would result in him losing face.
Are you sure if he actually wants to stay? If he wants to give the new company a try, he obviously wouldn’t say so to your face. He would naturally say that the situation is regrettable and not what he wants but he has no way other than going to his new workplace. You know very well he has no face to lose in this situation as a nobody who is already leaving/is just joining a new company.
1. very few companies would actually sue him unless he’s a C-suite of a multinational, and even then extremely unlikely
2. no
3. why would they do anything though?
I’m a little confused about which side is which.
The guy is in your company (“A”) *now*, but has signed an offer with company B to start work in November, and both the guy and company B are expecting him to start, but the guy was put on your team and likes working with you at A so much that he’s thinking of reneging on the offer he signed with B?
Phrases like “reject a signed offer” and “rescind the offer letter” are usually used from the hiring side, not the employee’s side. Company B could make him an offer, which he signs, and then rescind it, something cash-strapped companies sometimes do in recessions, leaving the people who would have become employees there to slink back to their current employers and attempt to stay, or suddenly start the job hunt again. Or B could make him an offer, which he signs, and he could renege on it, leaving B to scramble for a new employee.
If he reneges on his offer, he will probably be blacklisted by B, but B isn’t going to sue your company. They’ll just move to the next-best candidate. If he got the offer at B through a recruiter, the recruiter will presumably lose the commission that they were expecting.
At my company we’ve had people renege from time to time. Their names get taken off the new-hire list and they are quickly forgotten. No idea if they’re banned from applying again.