| name | offer-strategy |
| description | Use when a candidate has cleared the loop and you are preparing to extend or negotiate an offer — sets the target, band, flex levers, competing-offer read, and walk-away line before you make the offer. |
Offer Strategy
A playbook for closing accepted-in-principle candidates into signed offers that hold. The failure mode it prevents: improvising a number under pressure, over-promising to win a signature, and losing the hire — or the retention — because the offer was never thought through.
Set the numbers before the conversation
- Anchor to the approved comp band from the intake spec and the candidate's level. State a target number and the range you can move within.
- Identify the flex levers beyond base: start date, level, sign-on, non-cash factors the candidate values. Know which you can grant without further approval and which you can't.
- Set the walk-away line — the point past which this offer stops making sense — and get it approved before you're in the room. A walk line invented mid-negotiation is not a walk line.
Read the candidate's leverage
- Write down what the candidate told the loop they care about — the real motivations, not the assumed ones — and frame the offer around them.
- Assess their alternatives honestly: competing offers, current-role inertia, timing pressure. Compete against what's actually pulling them, not what you wish were.
- List the objections you already expect from this candidate and prepare an honest response to each. Never prepare a bluff.
Extend and negotiate
- Present the offer as a conversation that leads with fit and the work, then the numbers — not a document dropped in an inbox.
- Negotiate only inside the approved band, on things that are true. Compete on the role, the growth, and the team; never on pressure tactics or a deadline you won't hold.
- Watch for decline risk and escalate early — a slipping close is a Task update today, not a surprise next week.
Quality bar
- Target, band, flex levers, and walk line are set and approved before the offer.
- The offer is framed around the candidate's stated motivations.
- Every number and deadline is real — no bluffs, ever.
- Decline risk is surfaced early, not after the offer collapses.
Output format
Offer strategy: target and band → flex levers (grantable vs. needs-approval) → candidate motivations and alternatives → expected objections with honest responses → walk-away line → escalation triggers.
