The silent period between offer and start
Where a surprising share of your accepted offers quietly disappear.
An accepted offer is not a hire. Between signature and day one sits a notice period during which your new joiner will be counter offered, courted by the process they are still in elsewhere, and left alone by you.
Renege rates of five to ten percent are common. In hot markets and for long notice periods, higher.
Understand what happens on their side
Within a week of resigning, most people get a counter offer, a guilt conversation, or both. Their current employer is present daily. You are an email from three weeks ago. That asymmetry is the whole problem.
Make contact regular and low effort
A short message each week from the hiring manager, not the recruiter. Not a task, not a form. Something real: an article the team is discussing, a note about a project they will inherit, an introduction to one future colleague.
The point is to be a place they already belong to rather than an offer they accepted.
Front load anything that creates momentum
Send equipment early where you can. Add them to a read only channel if your security posture allows it. Invite them to one social thing, no obligation. Give them the ninety day plan in draft and ask for their comments. Being asked for an opinion before you start is unusually engaging.
Watch for the signs
Replies get shorter and slower. They go quiet on logistics. They ask to push the start date. Any of these deserve a direct call from the hiring manager the same day, and the call should be curious rather than accusatory. Occasionally you can save it. When you cannot, knowing three weeks early is worth a lot.
Have a plan for the ones you lose
Keep the runner up warm and honest, and know before you extend the first offer whether you would go back to them. The worst version of a renege is discovering that your second choice took another job two weeks ago and nobody was tracking it.