You Got the Big Job Offer. What If You Don’t Want It?

The plum opportunity you dreamed of is yours: a new job, a stretch assignment, a move to that big office abroad.

What happens if you don’t want it anymore?

Our ambitions are changing. Some of us are rethinking our relationship to work, prioritizing the rest of our lives over that next rung up the ladder. Others are concerned about a potential recession, the sense that if you’re last in, you’ll be first out.

“None of us have felt in control for a long time,” says Daisy Dowling, the chief executive of Workparent, a coaching and consulting company that serves organizations from law firms to sports leagues. “There’s a real sense of, ‘Gosh, darn it, I’m going to do the thing that’s right for me. I’m not going to get pushed around by circumstances anymore.’”

Still, declining an opportunity you raised your hand for, or one that used to be your dream, differs from saying no to pointless busywork or another 6 a.m. meeting. There’s the puzzle of what to say, how to say it. And sometimes there’s an identity crisis.

“Am I not a move-to-London person? Am I unambitious? If I put my hand down for this, will I ever be able to recover the lost ground?” Ms. Dowling says she’s hearing from clients.

It’s totally normal to wade through those questions. But don’t drag the boss or hiring manager along with you. Once you’ve made your choice, be definitive and emotionally neutral. “Upon further reflection, I’ve realized I need to take myself out of the process for personal reasons. This is not right for me,” Ms. Dowling suggests saying.

Share a few details if you’d like–you need to stay put until your child finishes high school, your partner was recently diagnosed with a health condition. Then pivot, Ms. Dowling says. How can you smooth this transition or help solve this leader’s problem? Maybe you can’t move to Los Angeles full-time, but you’ll fly out once a month to help onboard the new client.

Raul Lorenzana declined more lucrative roles to spend more time with his two daughters.PHOTO: RAUL LORENZANA

In early 2020, Raul Lorenzana told himself that it was time to move up and make more money. Though he loved his job managing a restaurant in Louisiana, he enrolled in his company’s training program to become a director, a more corporate role that would require extensive travel.

Enter Covid-19. Stuck at home, Mr. Lorenzana discovered the joy of spending more time with his daughters, now three and 13, after years of working a busy, unconventional restaurant schedule.

“That year made us realize—made me realize—how little we needed to have a happy life,” he says. “Before that, it was always drive-drive-drive, push-push-push. But there was never a final number, never a goal. It was just more.”

The family crunched numbers to see what they really needed to live on. Mr. Lorenzana opted out of the training program. They moved to Houston to be closer to extended family. There, Mr. Lorenzana turned down several jobs in favor of one that paid 20%-30% less than the other offers but featured a more flexible schedule.

He took one recruiter out for tea to decline, explaining that it was a difficult decision related to his family, not the opportunity. He followed up with a formal letter to his contacts at the company, praising the process and the recruiter’s interactions with him.

He doesn’t regret giving up the climb, for now.

“I was actually scared of it. If I get too far up the ladder, what’s expected of me, how could I be with my family?” he says.

If you can, bow out early in a search process, or mention your hesitation upfront, says Paul Pompeo, a recruiter based in Carlsbad, Calif. Bringing up concerns could eliminate you from consideration, but there’s also a chance being transparent would prompt the company to tweak the role in a way that makes it your dream job. The worst possible outcome is to have your “no” come as a total shock after rounds of interviews, he says. That makes you more likely to burn a bridge with that company, or even in the industry at large.

Christine Alemany was initially annoyed when a candidate turned down the marketing role she was offering at a technology company years ago. But the woman had been candid about how conflicted she felt about switching industries, and Ms. Alemany says she appreciated the honesty. That created a trust between them, she says, so she left the door open, telling the candidate to contact her if she changed her mind.

The candidate did, and Ms. Alemany felt comfortable accepting her “yes.” The two went on to work together for several years, says Ms. Alemany, who now runs her own marketing firm in New York City.

For Felami Burgess, a top leadership opportunity collided with concerns about burnout and flexibility.PHOTO: MARIE LAURE-ROUX

Saying no to an opportunity can be agonizing when it shatters longtime aspirations. For years, Felami Burgess, who works as a media-studies professor and runs her own production company, dreamed of ascending to a C-suite role at another organization. After spending much of the pandemic caring for her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, she began applying for jobs this spring. Soon, she was four interviews deep in the running to oversee a nonprofit in Pennsylvania.

“This is an executive-leadership role. I can do this,” she told herself. But as she prepared presentations and travelled from her home in New York to meet with the board, she began to worry about a move to a new state, the possibility of burning out and less flexibility to care for her mother.

Last month, she drafted a note to the directors, telling them she couldn’t continue with the process. As she pressed send, she began to tremble, she says, and then cry. Would an opportunity like this come again? For now, she’s holding fast to the belief that there’s nothing wrong with taking a career timeout.

“It is OK to put your mental health and well-being above all else, above money, above position, above obligation,” she says. “We certainly are free to change our minds.”

They call themselves TikTok refugees—and the app they are fleeing to is a lot more Chinese than the video-sharing app whose U.S. fate now hangs in the balance.

After Supreme Court justices Friday seemed inclined to let stand a law that would shut down TikTok in the U.S., the Chinese social-media platform Xiaohongshu , translated in English as Little Red Book, has received a flood of American TikTok users. They are looking for a sanctuary or a way to protest the potentially imminent TikTok ban—never mind that they don’t speak Chinese.

Charlotte Silverstein, a 32-year-old publicist in Los Angeles, downloaded Xiaohongshu on Sunday night after seeing videos on TikTok about migrating to the app, which Americans dubbed “RedNote.” She described the move as a “last act of defiance” in her frustration about the potential TikTok ban.

“Everyone has been super welcoming and sweet,” said Silverstein, who has made three posts so far. “I love the sense of community that I’m seeing already.”

By Monday, TikTok refugees had pushed Xiaohongshu to the top of the free-app chart on Apple ’s App Store.

“I’m really nervous to be on this app, but I also find it to be really exciting and thrilling that we’re all doing this,” one new Xiaohongshu user said in a video clip on Sunday. “I’m sad that TikTok might actually go, but if this is where we’re gonna be hanging out, welcome to my page!” Within a day, the video had more than 3,000 comments and 6,000 likes. And the user had amassed 24,000 followers.

Neither Xiaohongshu nor TikTok responded to requests for comment.

The flow of refugees, while serving as a symbolic dissent against TikTok’s possible shutdown, doesn’t mean Xiaohongshu can easily serve as a replacement for Americans. TikTok says it has 170 million users in the U.S., and it has drawn many creators who take advantage of the app’s features to advertise and sell their products.

Most of the content on Xiaohongshu is in Chinese and the app doesn’t have a simple way to auto-translate the posts into English.

At a time of a strained U.S.-China relationship, some new Chinese-American friendships are budding on an app that until now has had few international users.

“I like that two countries are coming together,” said Sarah Grathwohl, a 32-year-old marketing manager in Seattle, who made a Xiaohongshu account on Sunday night. “We’re bonding over this experience.”

Granthwohl doesn’t speak Chinese, so she has been using Google Translate for help. She said she isn’t concerned about data privacy and would rather try a new Chinese app than shift her screentime to Instagram Reels.

Another opportunity for bonding was a photo of English practice questions from a Chinese textbook, with the caption, “American please.” American Xiaohongshu users helped answer the questions in the comments, receiving a “thank u Honey,” from the person who posted the questions.

By Monday evening, there have been more than 72,000 posts with the hashtag #tiktokrefugee on Xiaohongshu, racking up some 34 million views.

In an English-language post titled “Welcome TikTok refugees,” posted by a Shanghai-based Xiaohongshu user, an American user responded in Chinese with a cat photo and the words, “Thank you for your warm welcome. Everyone is so cute. My cat says thanks, too.” The user added, “I hope this is the correct translation.”

Some Chinese users are also using the livestreaming function to invite TikTok migrants to chat. One chat room hosted by a Chinese English tutor had more than 179,900 visits with several Americans exchanging cultural views with Chinese users.

ByteDance-owned TikTok isn’t available in China but has a Chinese sister app, Douyin. American users can’t download Douyin, though; unlike Xiaohongshu, it is only accessible from Chinese app stores.

On Xiaohongshu, Chinese users have been sharing tutorials and tips in English for American users on how to use the app. Meanwhile, on TikTok, video clips have also multiplied over the past two days teaching users the correct pronunciation of Xiaohongshu—shau-hong-SHOO—and its culture.

Xiaohongshu may be new to most Americans, but in China, it is one of the most-used social-media apps. Backed by investors like Chinese tech giants Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group , Xiaohongshu is perhaps best described as a Chinese mix of Instagram and Reddit and its users increasingly treat it as a search engine for practical information.

Despite its Little Red Book name, Xiaohongshu has little in common with the compilation of Mao Zedong ’s political writings and speeches. In fact, the app aspires to be a guidebook about anything but politics.

Conceived as a shopping guide for affluent urbanites in 2013, Xiaohongshu has morphed into a one-stop shop for lifestyle and shopping recommendations. Every day, its more than 300 million users, who skew toward educated young women, create, share and search for posts about anything from makeup tutorials to career-development lessons, game strategies or camping skills.

Over the years, Xiaohongshu users have developed a punchy writing style, with posts accompanied by images and videos for an Instagram feel.

Chinese social-media platforms are required to watch political content closely. Xiaohongshu’s focus on lifestyle content, eschewing anything that might seem political, makes it less of a regulatory target than a site like Weibo , which in 2021 was fined at least $2.2 million by China’s cyberspace watchdog for disseminating “illegal information.”

“I don’t expect to read news or discussion of serious issues on Xiaohongshu,” said Lin Ying, a 26-year-old game designer in Beijing.

The American frenzy over a Chinese app is the reverse of a migration in recent years by Chinese social-media users seeking refuge from censorship on Western platforms , such as X, formerly known as Twitter, or, more recently, BlueSky.

Just like TikTok users who turn to the app for fun, Xiaohongshu users also seek entertainment through livestreams and short video clips as well as photos and text-posts on the platform.

Xiaohongshu had roughly 1.3 million U.S. mobile users in December, according to market-intelligence firm Sensor Tower, which estimates that U.S. downloads of the app in the week ending Sunday almost tripled compared with the week before.

Sensor Tower data indicates that Xiaohongshu became the top-ranked social-networking and overall free app on Apple’s App Store and the 8th top-ranked social app on the Google Play Store on Monday, “a feat it has never achieved before,” said Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower.

Run by Shanghai-based Xingin Information Technology, Xiaohongshu makes money primarily from advertising, according to a Xiaohongshu spokeswoman. The company was valued at $17 billion after its latest round of private-equity investment in the summer, according to research firm PitchBook Data.

Not everyone is singing kumbaya. Some Chinese Xiaohongshu users are worried about the language barrier. And some American TikTok users are concerned about data safety on the Chinese app.

But many are hoping to build bridges between the two countries.

“Y’all might think Americans are hateful because of how our politicians are, but I promise you not all of us are like that,” one American woman said on a Sunday video she posted on Xiaohongshu with Chinese subtitles.

She went on to show how to make cheese quesadillas using a waffle maker.

The video collected more than 11,000 likes and 3,000 comments within 24 hours. “It’s so kind of you to use Chinese subtitles,” read one popular comment posted by a user from Sichuan province.

Another Guangdong-based user commented with a bilingual “friendly reminder”: “On Chinese social-media platforms please do not mention sensitive topics such as politics, religion and drugs!!!”

You Got the Big Job Offer. What If You Don’t Want It?

You can say no to a new position or assignment, gracefully–and keep your options intact.

Chinese users of Xiaohongshu, or Little Red Book, welcome Americans fleeing a feared TikTok ban