What Happens When a Job Offer Is Rescinded?

You made it through the interviews, they picked you, and you accepted the job. Getting a job offer feels like you’re done with the hard part. So getting a call or email before your first day saying the offer has been withdrawn can be hard to make sense of. You thought the job was yours.

A rescinded offer means the company offered you the job and then took the offer back before you started. Even if you had already accepted, that doesn’t necessarily mean you did something wrong or that the company suddenly changed its mind about you. Something may have changed on their end.

The Job Can Change Before You Start

The company may have fully intended to hire you when it made the offer. Then something changes before your first day.

Maybe the department loses funding, the company puts hiring on hold, or the team is reorganized and the position is eliminated. None of those things necessarily changes the fact that you were the person they chose for the job. There just may not be a job there anymore.

That’s part of what makes a rescinded offer so frustrating. You can accept a real offer for a real position, and the position can still disappear before you ever get the chance to start.

Some Offers Still Depend on a Few Things

In other cases, the job is still there, but the offer depends on something that hasn’t been completed yet.

You might get an offer that’s pending a background check, verification of information, or another requirement that has to be met before you start. The company has picked you for the job, but that last part still matters. If a condition of the offer isn’t met, the company may take the offer back.

From your side, that can look exactly like a company changing its plans. You had an offer, you expected to start, and now you don’t have the job. But the reason it happened can be completely different.