Employment issues: turning a job offer down

Are you afraid to say no to a job offer? After all, you did spend a great deal of time putting your application together, organising your interview clothes and then answering a million questions during the rapid half an hour you'd been allocated to prove you were the best person for the job. So why would you consider turning work down?

There are many reasons for turning work down. It may be you have been offered the perfect job and the one you are turning down doesn't even come close. Or it may be that you didn't like the people or the place - sometimes your instinct knows when something isn't right and whatever "it" is - you don't feel you will stay long even if you did take the job. Which is why - people feel they shouldn't.

Most people are, especially when it comes to turning a job down, they feel that by turning a job opportunity down they are:

• Never going to work again;
• Wasting everyone’s time – including their own, the interviewers, the HR people, the employment agency;
• The job market is so tight there just isn’t anything else going; and
• You need the money.

This internal negative dialogue can be deafening, and most people are afraid of it, so they give in, reasoning that anything will do, and it will solve a few problems after all.

In reality all this does is create more problems than it solves. You may start out by trying to do the right thing by your new boss, you arrive on time, you do what is expected of you – but no more, you don’t make the effort to fit in.

Then what happens?

You don’t want to get out of bed in a morning, your appearance isn’t as sharp as it used to be, you may take longer lunch breaks than you are supposed to. As things start to progress you resent those people who are “getting on”, receiving pay rises that you don’t seem to get any more, people don’t include you in their conversations or out of work activities, you may even start to take time off work because you hate the place and the people in it.

Most people are afraid to trust their instincts that says – actually this job isn’t right for me. The job sounded great on paper, and that is why I applied for it. But it’s not really what I want to do at all.  I know something better is just around the corner, one that will fit my skills and abilities far better, and be far more challenging than this role.

So don’t be afraid to say no.