Author: Sam Griffin

There is an expectation in the HR world that a candidate wants to work and will accept almost any offer within reason. Your hiring team has already put in so much work finding the right candidate, interviewing Mr. or Ms. Right, and crafting a carefully considered job offer. However, the candidate doesn’t always accept. Luckily, Oracle makes it easy for you to redraft rejected job offers using Oracle Recruiting Cloud.In Oracle Recruiting Cloud, a candidate’s application proceeds through the candidate selection process. After the most promising candidate is chosen by your recruiting or hiring team, you then draft a job offer for them.

A job offer moves throughout the job offer life cycle in the Offer phase. In this phase, a job offer transitions into different states, marking its progress and tracking its current status. A job offer begins as an idea in the state Offer – To Be Created and, if all goes well, completes the job offer life cycle in the state Offer – Accepted.

A job offer should contain basic information a candidate will need like the following:

  • When do I start?
    • A candidate needs to know when they are joining the team. There’s a good chance a candidate is currently working a different job or more involved in home life and they need time to transition.
  • What’s my role?
    • A candidate’s role, or “assignment,” acts as a what’s what, detailing their business unit, job, grade, position, and location.
  • What’s my position?
    • Not everyone can be the manager. If a job offer is built based on a position, your company knows exactly where they are placing this new hire, but the candidate might not like where that is.
  • What’s the pay like?
    • This is a big one. Candidate’s want confirmation that they are being paid for their work and paid well. For Oracle, this is broken down into a salary basis and salary amount. A salary basis is how often a person is paid (weekly, bimonthly, monthly, some other option) and what currency they are paid with. The salary amount is how much a candidate is paid per salary basis. For example, $2,700 USD monthly.

These and other details are collected into a job offer and job offer letter that will be sent to the candidate after going through any necessary approval steps determined by your company.

When do candidates reject job offers?

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Once the details of a job offer are established, it is time to send this carefully crafted package to the candidate. The job offer, now Offer – Extended, is sent to external candidates via email or SMS. After a candidate proves who they are using a 6-digit verification code, they are sent a link so they can view their job offer.

Candidates are able to view and print the job offer, open any related attachments, and view media files prepared by your team like informative videos. A candidate has two options at this point: Accept or Decline.

Ideally, a candidate accepts the first offer provided by your team. After giving their e-signature, the candidate’s job offer changes states to Offer – Accepted and is transferred out of the Offer phase and into the HR phase where the candidate is processed as a new hire. Unfortunately, the candidate doesn’t always accept on the first try.When a candidate uses the Decline option, the job offer transitions into the Offer – Withdrawn by Candidate state. A candidate declining your offer is always a possibility, but this rejection still stings. After putting in the effort to find, interview, and select this candidate over any other options, you are certain they are the right fit for the job, but they don’t consider the job the right fit for them.

If you want all the effort your hiring team has made to not go to waste, you’re going to have to renegotiate with the candidate. Your team will have to redraft rejected job offers using Oracle Recruiting Cloud. The alternative, deleting the job offer and starting the whole process over again, would mean losing the candidate your processes have determined is a great match for the job.

Fortunately, you can redraft rejected job offers using Oracle Recruiting Cloud with the Redraft Offer action until both you and your ideal candidate is satisfied.

Redraft rejected job offers using Oracle Recruiting Cloud: what should you change?

The Redraft Offer action provides your team with a second chance to redraft rejected job offers using Oracle Recruiting Cloud and snag the perfect candidate, provided you can make meaningful changes to the offer. This action sends a job offer back to the Offer – Draft state, where your team crafts a new job offer and job offer letter for your team to resubmit through your configured levels of approval and, eventually, back to the candidate for round two.

Speaking of approval, your organization is able to establish (or skip) a section of the job offer life cycle where a drafted job offer is reviewed by a specified individual on your team. This is typically someone related to the job requisition like a manager of the department the candidate will be working in or another member of the hiring team checking their fellow recruiter’s work.

While a job offer is in the Offer – Pending Approval state, the designated approver is able to review and approve different parts of the job offer. Incorporating this process into your job offer lifecycle helps prevent job offers from getting rejected by candidates over clerical errors like an incorrect date or position. However, to complete their job successfully, the approver must be granted certain security user privileges like View Job Offer or View Job Offer Salary.

When you redraft rejected job offers using Oracle Recruiting Cloud, you need to identify areas where the offer could be improved. During this process, consider statistics on how people consider work, such as the following 2019-2020 statistics on American worker satisfaction conducted by Gallup:

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  • Job security: A quarter of the workforce considers it “very likely” or “fairly likely” that they will lose their job within a year. 65% of the adult working population (full and part time) listed they are “completely satisfied” with their job security. With faith in job security up, candidates may be less likely to want to leave a current position or more hesitant to commit to a new one because it’s possible they will be staying for a longer period of time.
  • Job flexibility: 87% of American workers reported to Gallup they are “completely” or “somewhat” satisfied with the flexibility of their working hours. If your job offer requires strict adherence to an hourly office schedule, there’s a good chance your candidate can find better hours to suit their life and family needs somewhere else.
  • Benefits: 64% of American workers reported they are “completely satisfied” or somewhat satisfied” with their employer’s health insurance offerings and 66% reported the same levels of satisfaction for employer provided retirement plans. Your offerings in these regards must be competitive at best, acceptable at worst.
  • Salary: It’s not always the reason for worker (or candidate) dissatisfaction, but sometimes it’s that simple. 78% of American workers were reported to be “completely” or “somewhat” satisfied with their pay. For the remaining percentage, an attractive salary might do the trick, provided your organization has the resources.

Be sure to take another look at the candidate’s application for insight on why they might have declined. Does their background – their work experience and education – prove their worth as a candidate, no matter the cost? Are they perhaps overqualified for the position you’re offering? When all else fails, it isn’t a bad idea to ask the candidate themselves. Some rejections are for reasons as simple as location preference. Others, like a candidate’s belief they belong in a better- or higher-paying position, are more complicated.

When you think your new job offer is ready to go and it has passed through any approval requirements, you can re-extend the job offer using the Extend Offer action.There’s a lot to consider when offering (or reoffering) a job. In fact, it’s too much information for us to cover in a single post. For instance, the entire Offer – Extended phase of the job offer process can be bypassed in favor of a different process where the hiring team instead manually accepts a job offer on behalf of the candidate.

There’s also headcount verification, an important step in evaluating whether your organization should, or has the resources to, extend a job offer and hire a new candidate. This is true regardless of whether you are attempting to hire the candidate for the first time or making another attempt after redrafting your job offer.

More information on configuring a job offer process that fits your company’s needs, and the necessary verifications that come with this process, are available with ENGAGE, Maverick Solutions’ comprehensive, subscription-based Oracle training model. Speak with one of our training experts today to learn more or request a demo.