It is often overwhelming to compare job offers. People tend to focus on only a few factors like title, salary, stock, or total compensation. While these factors do matter, they do not paint the full picture of a new job opportunity. 

There are so many other factors that will impact your decision and affect your happiness and satisfaction with a new job. For example, one job may give you a much higher total compensation right now, but not set you up for greater success later. Or, you may take a role that seems great now, but a really long commute makes you miserable six months later. 

It helps to consider all of these other factors when comparing opportunities. The quantitative score out of 100% tries to make it a little less emotional and easier to compare the job offers too. Of course, your gut feel is important and will play a role. But, it’s helpful to have objective data as a “gut check.”

This spreadsheet is for anyone faced with the challenge of comparing multiple job offers. It can feel overwhelming. There are often factors that are really important for you, but they might get overlooked in the heat of the moment. This spreadsheet lets you slow down and seriously compare the offers on the factors that matter the most to you.

I use a Likert scale of 1 to 5. A score of 5 is the best, and 1 is the worst for each factor. You can roughly think of the ratings like this:

Note: if you don't enter a number between 1-5, the total at the top will be off from the max of 100%. Simply enter a score of 3 to treat a factor as neutral.

Yes, absolutely! It is easy to enter your own information for the company names and compensation numbers. Just overwrite the placeholders that I have.

Also, you'll obviously want to score the factors (1-5) with your own ratings. Note: if you don't use a number between 1-5, the total at the top will be off from the max of 100%.

You can also overwrite any of the Factors with some that are more important for you. For example, you might want to change the "Coffee" factor to "Allows dogs at the office."

If you are comfortable with creating and editing formulas in spreadsheets, you can play around with adding more rows and factors. You will have to modify the "Total score" formula to account for those changes (e.g., if you add a factor in a new row).

There are two different Excel spreadsheets that you can choose to download and use:

The Leaders spreadsheet is intended for people who will be comparing senior-level roles that include managing and leading teams. The Independent Contributors spreadsheet is for people who will not be managing others.