You'd be surprised how many companies will simply pull you out of the candidate process and decline the offer. Companies you would probably work for, to be honest.
This works when you're pitting say, Netflix vs Meta or Apple vs Microsoft, or Google vs Amazon etc. but if you go down the ladder just a little, you'd be shocked at how much this doesn't work, is all.
I feel like its too general of advice to say you can simply play two companies off each other.
There's other tactics too, like setting a high minimum acceptable amount of compensation upfront, that one can use.
I believe that this has been your experience - I can only offer my own as another data point.
I've done the "two competing offers" thing four or five times at companies big and small. I've never had a company rescind an offer or ghost. In fact they all seem to expect a competing offer; all have asked "Are you interviewing anywhere else?" at some point.
I agree with discussing a minimum early on in the interview process. It's a good smoke test to ensure neither party's time is being wasted.
I’ve never heard of a company pulling an offer because a candidate was applying somewhere else.
As a hiring manager, I’ve certainly never done it, because I basically don’t care where else you’re considering working. I’ll put our situation (project, team, comp, culture, etc) forward and you decide if you think it’s your best option. We might negotiate a tiny amount, but if you find a place that’s a lot better for you, you should go there, but I’m not pulling back the offer we made.
I do want to clarify, its not common (the pull the offer part), but I've had a friend go through it, and I once had it happen.
More often, alot of times the company will say something about going with the other offer, like you stated, or something in that ballpark.
A couple times though, I had a company dutifully try and convince me that the perks and work-life balance were better, even thought the salary maybe was not. That was an interesting one.
If you told me I got a ton of vacation time for a significant salary cut I would seriously consider the offer. Or some 4-day workweek setup. Those are the kind of things I would take a significant chunk of less money for.
