How to turn down an offer

If you are incredibly lucky at some point in your life, you will be blessed with the choice of multiple opportunities, of which you can only accept one. This might be for graduate school, an internship, or a full-time job. This post is how to decline such an offer with grace and poise.

Why is this important to do? Getting an offer in front of someone can be an enormous amount of work, and often requires the stars to align (particularly thinking about faculty job offers). There’s at least one person (and likely multiple people) highly invested in your accepting, professionally and emotionally. Maybe they went out of their way to answer your questions and help you make a decision. And behind the scenes, a lot might have gone on. They could have fought on your behalf and done a lot of work to make that offer come through. The goal is to communicate your decision to these people in a polite and thoughtful way. Besides being a kind thing to do, these individuals are also likely to continue to be relevant in your research career, so best to not leave them with a bad feeling about you.

The worst thing to do: ghost your contacts. That is, after you receive an offer, ignore any and all messages from your contacts and hope they get the picture. They eventually will, but this is quite rude. 

Perhaps par for the course: officially decline the offer, by clicking a button in a system, or emailing the person who sent you the offer (e.g., the department chair, the HR rep, etc.). This may be sufficient, but given the context above, I would recommend a bit more. Imagine you were highly invested in a candidate, you really went out of your way to try to convince them to come, and you learned about their decision only through an impersonal online system, where a field changed to “offer declined.”

A general principle: the more warmth and kindness someone shows you, the more you should give them in return. This principle holds much more broadly than the present context.

Correspondingly, try to identify all the people who you think spent a lot of time/energy/emotions on you and/or would have been excited to see you accept the offer. In the context of a faculty job, this could include the department chair, the host for your visit, and members of the group you’d be joining. If you’re not sure about someone, it doesn’t hurt to include them. And send them a kind email, thanking them, telling them you’re declining the offer, and, if it has been decided, what you’ll be doing instead. In a pinch, even a one sentence email thanking them for their time but you’ve decided to pursue other opportunities is better than nothing. One tricky point is whether to include a reason: if you can do it in a non-offensive way that leaves the door open for further interactions, go for it (e.g., don’t tell them that the people there bored you to tears with their research). If you can’t, feel free to leave it blank. The recipients understand you can only pursue one opportunity, and will appreciate you telling them personally. Sending such emails will of course take some time, but it’s a lower order term compared to the time invested by both parties to reach this point, so it’s worth doing. You can send just one email to all such individuals at an institution, though if you feel like you had a closer connection with someone, you can send them a separate personal message. 

The above may feel difficult to some. After all, sending someone negative news is never pleasant, and one may prefer to just avoid it. But as you progress in your career, uncomfortable situations like this will arise again and again, so it’s worth developing the skills to handle them.

Acknowledgments
Thanks to Bailey Kacsmar, Sandeep Silwal, Adam Smith, and Thomas Steinke for comments on this blog post.