Why do we flake on jobs and what to do about it?

A recent twitter thread brought up an unfortunate aspect of the Indian startup ecosystem - the rampant problem of flakes.
Flakes are people who interview with a company, get a job offer, accept it, commit to join and then disappear at the last minute. Anecdotal discussions with friends tell me that the Accept to Join ratio in India is >2:1 in India while it’s approximately 1:1 in the US. So even after a candidate accepts your offer and agrees in writing that they will join your company, half of them are simply going to flake out.

Why does this happen?

The reasons for these are many but completely understandable. First and foremost, as a flake, you have an absolutely zero downside, financial or emotional. The hiring manager gets outraged but there’s not much they can do . They may decide to never to hire you again, but that no bearing on your market prospects/the other companies who are still willing to hire you.

While there is a clear upside, usually financial; most people flake because of better offers combined with better location, title, etc. Second, is the general lack of seriousness in the environment. India ranks 164th in enforcing contracts. Even if the offer letter stated that flaking would allow the company to sacrifice your first born to Satan, there is no way in hell the company could actually go about enforcing that contract . What does this mean? While the company treats offer acceptance as a serious commitment and stops hiring for a given role, the candidate feels a much lesser need to honour the same.

So you end up in the situation we are now.

So how do we stop this?

In an environment where you can’t enforce a strong legal/financial commitment, you can instead shoot for an emotional commitment. Also, you want to escalate the perceived level of seriousness and commitment of the offer acceptance. What you want to do is make the candidate aware that accepting the offer is a hard commitment and that you will stop hiring once this offer is accepted, so you expect them to do the same . It is completely fine for them to shop around/look for competing offers before they accept the offer but not fair if they do so after.

Possible suggestions

Give the candidate ample time (2 weeks seems fair) to decide on the offer.
Make the candidate aware that you are ok with 1) Them taking time to decide 2) Considering other available offers; but are expecting a final decision in 2 weeks.
After acceptance, give the candidate a small offer acceptance bonus or send over a laptop/other welcome gift to increase their level of investment.
While the candidate has accepted, invite them over to meet the team or have a lunch together. (This is a mixture of my own thoughts plus suggestions from Anuj Khurana and Ritesh Banglani) Other suggestions from the twitter thread Flakes on the the blockchain: Good solution in theory, maybe practical too. Too far off for now. Hopefully in the future, employment changes/offer accepts will be publicly accessible information preventing any party from being in the dark. Hire multiple people for the same role: Seems silly and only tenable if you are a big and/or fast growing company who can afford to get a person onboard and later find a role for them. Stop talking to people with offers: Good for the ecosystem but hard to enforce, candidates can simply lie. Also, unless a person has committed elsewhere, it is fine for a hiring discussion to begin. Creates a prisoners dilemma like situation where companies don’t talk to candidates hoping other companies do the same, which is again hard to know; so there’s always the temptation to defect. A secret blacklist of flakes amongst founders/CEOs/startups: Highly against this idea because of the lack of transparency. Candidates don’t know if they’re on the blacklist and how to get off of it . Unless we’re careful, founders may use the blacklist as a personal vendetta tool, who’s gonna verify if the flake happened?