Job Offer Retracted After Negotiation: What Should I Do Next?

Hi, kindly guide me on what to do in the following situation:

Offer and Negotiation Process

The company calls you for a senior position (Product Head) and conducts all necessary interviews with higher authorities. After multiple calls to their office and other communications, they complete all formalities. Eventually, you are offered a position as a Product Manager with an offer letter. You negotiate for both the position and compensation. Following this, you are given a few assignments to complete, which you do on time. However, as feedback, you learn from HR that your "candidature is on hold." This suggests that the employer has gone through all the formalities and hired you, but during negotiations, they retract the offer citing it being "on hold."

In light of this situation, could someone please advise on what steps I should take now?

Thank you.

Dear friend, The issue of the appointment letter is the starting point of the employer-employee relationship. In your case, your prospective employer has given an Offer Letter but not the Appointment Letter. Therefore, you are not an employee of that company.

Appointment Letter vs. Offer Letter

"Appointment Letter" is a contract between the employer and the employee under the provisions of the Indian Contract Act, 1872. However, should an "Offer Letter" also be construed as a contract? It is a matter of interpretation by the court. How the court will interpret the act cannot be said. However, in case you have adequate material evidence to prove that the company has taken some work from you after issuing the "Offer Letter" and later backtracked, causing you monetary loss, then the court might come to your rescue. However, much depends on how vigorously your lawyer puts forth the argument.

Advice on Current Employment

On the strength of the offer letter, if you have not resigned from your current job, then continue your current job and forget what has happened to you!

Feedback on Your Candidature

If you had applied for the position of Product Head, then you were supposed to be a senior person. By now, you could have acquired skills to identify the genuineness of the future employer. In your interaction, they must have sent some signals of unprofessionalism, disconnect between two departments, etc. Your failure to capture those signals has pushed you into this predicament. Leadership demands not just reading between the lines but seeing between the lines or listening between the lines; please note.

Feedback to HR

For a company, it is easy to put on hold filling up a vacancy even after the issue of the Offer Letter. However, this is unprofessional behavior. Unprofessionalism aside, the company has no right to play with a candidate's career. HR is most vocal about employee engagement or employer branding and so on. However, when the testing times arise, all this wisdom is abandoned at the altar of pleasing the boss. This is highly deplorable!

Thanks,

Dinesh Divekar

Thank you for the quick and positive response. However, this is not all about receiving an offer or appointment letter and joining a company. It is about, as you rightly said, the unprofessionalism of a company and the "taken for a ride" approach. They must understand how much an employee puts into their effort to get selected at a higher level. It does not only include monetary losses in terms of half-days taken, travel costs, and many more, but also the mental toll in terms of the time you spend giving your best while putting other things aside.

This disappointment affects employees and erodes trust in the brand.