Kate Wendleton, founder and president of national job coaching organization The Five O’clock Club says the decision should hinge on which position will do your career the most good in the long run. Though job seekers are almost always heavily swayed by money, she advises looking at how a job will affect both your day-to-day life and your future career prospects. A client of Wendleton’s who worked in financial consulting, wound up with three offers at the same time. One of the jobs paid $325,000 a year, and would have required her to travel constantly. The second job would have required less travel; it paid $225,000. The third job, for a rating agency with reasonable hours, paid $125,000. Because Wendleton’s client had a small child, and she knew the rating agency job could lead to other opportunities, she chose the lower-paid position so she could spend more time with her child. Ideally, you would have a 40-year career plan, but often a five-year plan is the best you can do.
Of course it can be a tough feat to manage all your negotiations so that the job offers ripen at exactly the same time. Ruth Robbins, a Five O’clock Club coach in New York, recently had a client who worked in media audience development, who was talking to three different companies. One was a small, quirky magazine that didn’t pay well, another was his old employer, who wanted him to return on an hourly basis, and the third was a large, well-paying publication. The client most wanted to work at the large publication, but he hadn’t yet gotten an offer. His next move: stall for time. He told the other two companies that he wasn’t ready to give them an answer and then let the third place know that he had two other offers. “It was a lot of juggling and a lot of stress,” says Robbins. But the third offer came through and the client took it. “He really clinched the best offer he could,” says Robbins.