Cobalt Hiring Group — Offer Integrity & Eligibility Policy (Confidential)

COBALT HIRING GROUP — OFFER INTEGRITY & ELIGIBILITY POLICY

Confidential. Circulate internally only. An offer, once spoken aloud, becomes a liability. Treat it accordingly.

ELIGIBILITY RECALCULATION

Extend the offer. Let them negotiate. Let them accept. Let them tell their manager and order their equipment. Then, at the moment of maximum inconvenience, discover a miscalculation. The preferred error is a tenure requirement the candidate met on paper and did not meet in our ledger. Their employment history has been on file the entire time; retrieving it late is not an oversight, it is timing.

TOTAL COMPENSATION

Post a range. Interview to the top of it. Then offer the floor and call the difference “total potential compensation” — health insurance at sticker price, incentives we may or may not fund, a wellness stipend nobody has redeemed. If the candidate cites the posted floor, explain that the posting was aspirational. If they cite it twice, note that they are “focused on the wrong things.”

COMPETITIVE SEARCH

Engage a headhunter so that no salary range ever enters the file. Have them tell the candidate “you are the guy.” Wait two days. Then find the candidate too expensive — a conclusion available at any earlier moment, and useful only now.

NO-SHOWS

If a panel fails to appear, do not reschedule. Two days later, state that the candidate missed the interview at the agreed time. We keep no record of who joined a call, which means the record shows whatever we say it shows.

CLOSING

Notify nobody. Where notice is unavoidable, keep it to a single line, and never the reason.

— Cobalt Hiring Group. We extend offers. Occasionally in reverse.

From the Satire Desk at goodbye, interview. All companies and people in this memo are fictional. Satire is always labelled and never names real companies — the true stories do that on their own. Spotted an error of fact in our non-fiction? Corrections.