How should I react to a hiring manager offering undocumented benefits during the interview process?

Question

I recently made the mistake of not asking upfront what the compensation and benefits package were for a company I was interviewing with and we only discussed benefits after receiving the tentative offer (lesson learned.) At that point, the hiring manager admitted that the benefits were poor but arrangements could be made to make things work.

Later that night I received an email from the manager's personal email address and was offered a number of things "under the table" or better put "undocumented" outside of the signed offer.

Is this act normal? Was I right to decline the position and further negotiations on this ground?

I would have loved to work in that position and on the projects he had lined up, but I'm confident this is some type of ethics violation that could be considered grounds for termination if discovered.

[The following is copied from a comment by the OP]
The amount of PTO I had initially asked for was offered off the books and that we'd make arrangements to use them outside of the current system. The current policy is that PTO is earned and I wouldn't accrue it until X amount of days. What bothered me was that I could not get this in writing and it was offered without HR being present or through an internal email address

Answer 1

Is this act normal?

Generally speaking, no its not normal practice.

Also, holding the company accountable for what was promised in a personal email would be hard to do. You would even be in worse shape in regards to under the table benefits should the hiring manager leave.

Was I right to decline the position and further negotiations on this ground?

Your best bet was to act as you did, decline it, and maybe go back to them and insist that all benefit offerings are made official through the companies standard flow.

There is probably a good reason the extra perks weren't offered officially.

Answer 2

Is this act normal?

I've never seen that happen.

Was I right to decline the position and further negotiations on this ground? I was in love with the position and would have loved working on the projects he had lined up, but I'm almost surely confident that this is some type of ethics violation that could be considered grounds for termination if discovered.

You are right to be suspicious. You are right to avoid accepting "under the table/undocumented" benefits. But you didn't have to decline the position entirely.

You could have indicated that you didn't want under the table benefits that might disappear if the manager leaves. You could have continued job negotiations with the understanding that you would accept the normal PTO just like any other employee.

It's up to you to decide if the normal package of salary plus above the table benefits were sufficient for a position you are in love with, or not.

Answer 3

This is super unusual.

Later that night I received an email from the manager's personal email address and was offered a number of things "under the table" or better put "undocumented" outside of the signed offer.

But frankly, I'm not at all surprised.

Potential employers try to make verbal offers, that they'll refuse to document/acknowledge immediately after the fact, all the time. It's a way to make their offers non-binding. It's just super peculiar and super weird that in this case, that this person used email to try to have the same effect.

If I were you, I would have offered to make an official counteroffer listing all the additional terms he included in his email (but offering to make it seem like those additional terms were coming from me, not from the supervisor). If the supervisor would have been amenable to that idea, then I would have emailed his official email address with my counteroffer (carbon copying HR on it).

But otherwise, I think you did well to reject the job offer. Non-binding terms are never a good idea. That supervisor could be lying to you, he could be replaced tomorrow, and the form of the offer itself was a red flag.