Your long hours and hard work have paid off – you have a job offer! Now you have a decision to make. The company wants to have your response quickly, and the job looks good. What should you do?

Answer: Take the time you feel that you need to make the decision. Don’t rush it. That well-worn piece of advice to sleep on a big decision turns out to be good advice, backed up by psychological research.  Take some time to think it over.

The reason isn’t that you’ll make a poor decision if you don’t wait; it’s the way we go about making the decision that almost always leaves us with regret, says research psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson.

Making a quick decision in itself may not be a bad idea. In fact, author Malcolm Gladwell says that snap judgments can be very effective because human beings are very good at assessing a situation quickly and with little data. And he offers a lot of scientific evidence to back up his argument.

The problem with quick decisions isn’t the outcome, it’s the process. We just cannot escape the feeling that we moved too fast and didn’t consider things carefully enough, Halvorson says. It has more to do with our subjective impressions about making the decision than anything else. We feel like we’re being rushed, and we regret the decision – even if it turns out well.

We also feel more rushed when we have more options at our disposal because there is more information to think about. One study showed that people who had to choose a DVD from a group of 30 felt much more rushed, and regretted the decision they made a lot more, than people who had to choose from only five DVDs, even though both groups had as much time as they wanted to take.

So, it’s not how long we take to make the decision, what is important to us is whether we feel we took enough time to make the decision.

The takeaway here is – make sure you give yourself enough time to make a decision. If you don’t, you will invariably regret the decision, even if it’s a good one.

It’s rarely a poor decision to register with a staffing service such as RealStreet Staffing. We can help you find temporary assignments (which can help you get your foot in the door with a company), or even place you in direct-hire opportunities with some of the Mid-Atlantic area’s best firms. If you’re an architecture, engineering or construction professional, contact us today!