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Tools - Offer Acceptance Check
Six weeks of sourcing, screening and interviewing, and the decline arrives at the finish line. It is almost never a surprise in hindsight. Score the offer against the reasons engineers actually walk, before you send it, and see which one is yours.
Nothing you enter is uploaded. The offer is scored on this page by JavaScript running on your own machine, against bands already published on this site. There is no save, no email gate on the result, and closing the tab discards it.
The role
The money
The process
The candidate
This offer
-/100
-Copied. It is plain text, so it will paste into anything.
If the top item on that list is the money, the salary checker will tell you what the band actually is. If it is the process, that is usually the cheaper thing to fix.
Get a market read on this role →Methodology
Nine checks, each with a fixed weight, summing to exactly 100. The offer starts at 100 and every check that fails takes points off and names what it took them for. The checks are the four reasons engineers decline at the final stage, which we cover in full in what drives offer acceptance: a counter-offer from their current employer, compensation misaligned late, a slow or disjointed process, and culture or flexibility surfacing at the end.
Three separate checks are about pace rather than money, because poor communication is the single most cited complaint from candidates who declined, and it does not show up as one number. It shows up as elapsed weeks, as round count, and as silence after the final interview.
The one check that is a fact rather than a judgement is the offer against the published band, which comes from the same 2026 accepted-offer dataset as the Salary Checker and the Salary Index. Everything else is a question about your process, which is why every failed check ends with something to do rather than a number to look at.
The score is not a probability. The weights are our editorial judgement about relative importance, not a regression: we hold no dataset that would support a calibrated probability, and inventing one would be the dishonest version of this tool. What fixed weights buy is comparability. The same offer always scores the same, so a fixed offer can be measured against the original, and two offers can be compared. For context, and only context, market acceptance runs around 84 per cent globally and a few points below that in Australia.
Company stage does not change the score. It changes the note, because a seed-stage startup and a listed company lose candidates for almost opposite reasons, which we set out in why offers get declined by company stage.
Common questions
No, and it is deliberately not presented as one. It is a rule-based checklist scored against the reasons engineers actually decline, with fixed weights. We hold no dataset that would support a calibrated probability, and inventing one would be the dishonest version of this tool. What the fixed weights buy is comparability: two offers scored here are scored the same way, so the difference between them means something.
The four reasons candidates decline at the final stage: a counter-offer from their current employer, compensation misaligned late in the process, a slow or disjointed process, and culture or flexibility surfacing at the end. Poor communication is the single most cited complaint from candidates who declined, which is why three separate checks are about pace and contact rather than money.
No. Every figure is scored on this page by JavaScript running on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is saved, and closing the tab discards it. There is no email gate on the result.
Because not knowing is itself a risk: you cannot tell whether the offer is worth moving for, or how cheaply their current employer could match it. It costs fewer points than knowing the uplift is thin, so the tool never rewards staying ignorant.