It's not enough to want the new hire on your team, they have to want to be on your team too.

I had an offer a while ago which I accepted then I received the contract they wanted me to sign. Their standard contract, this was, nothing special for my role and all I can say is "Oh Hell No!".

I politely emailed back and said I was not going to sign that contract and was withdrawing my offer to work for them.

A little while afterwards, I got a phone call begging me to re-consider and promising that any clause in the contract I was unhappy with could be left out of a new contract, that I could have anything I wanted as long as I joined up... so its fair to say they were showing me the "want".

I still said no. My feeling at this point was that regardless of what my "final" contract read, I didn't want to work for an employer that would consider sending the first contract I saw out to someone.

They just didn't seem to "get" that. An example of corporate policy and a HR department screwing it up for the hiring manager perhaps?