Earlier this week, a recruiter told me a story about a job seeker who was already employed but looking to jump elsewhere. She interviewed with a firm that really loved her and they were eager to hire her immediately but in the end she declined their offer saying she talked it over with the firm she was with and decided to stay. Clearly her firm had sweetened the pot to entice her to stick around. The recruiter let the hiring firm know that she decided to stay at her current job and that was that.
Many months pass and now the candidate’s firm is bought by another firm. The culture is rapidly changing for the worse, people are getting PIP’d to death and laid off, and the survivors are anxious they’ll be next on the chopping block. So the job seeker reaches out to the recruiter and says she’s once again on the market. The recruiter contacts that other firm and says “Good news! That auditor you liked is looking to make an exit now.” “No thanks,” said the firm. “That bridge has been burned.”
As far as the firm was concerned, the job seeker pitted them up against the current firm and leveraged their interest in her to secure a raise.
The candidate is still on the market.
I’m positive we’ve written a lot about counteroffers over the years but all I could find in the archive after 20 seconds of Googling was this old Open Items post: Should I stay or should I go now? (Counter-offer). Sadly any comments made on that post were forever lost when we switched away from Disqus for comment management some years ago. Hope that person figured it out.
Thus, I’m posing the question to the audience now. Counteroffers: yea or nay? Anyone have good or bad experiences to share? Is there anything wrong with using other firms to force your current one into a generous counteroffer?
Oh and here, I found another old article: Counteroffers Rarely Work for Employees Jumping Ship. Same topic, different perspective.
I think I’ve seen statistics that show that if you accept a counter offer to remain at your current company, the chances of you ending up leaving in six months or a year anyway are extremely high. This is because in most cases money wasn’t the primary or only factor in your decision to look elsewhere. You weren’t happy about something at your current company, and it likely won’t change. So they could throw you some more money and you could decide to stay, but the issues that are making you unhappy remain.
As a personal anecdote, this exact thing happened with me a few years ago. I got another offer and planned to leave. My current employer offered me a big raise, and I decided to stay. A couple months later, the other company came back to me with a better offer, and I changed my mind and decided to leave. Money is important and it might give you that push you need to pull the trigger and make a change, but that’s usually not the main reason why you’re considering leaving your current company.
I forgot to say…GC should go back to Disqus. The comments section was a lot more lively and entertaining back then.
Sad to say I don’t think bringing back Disqus would recapture the joy of your curmudgeon glory days. People just don’t engage with blogs like that anymore.
It was superior for sure. Especially when the resident jerks (*cough*) would get a bunch of bitchy responses and they’d all be neatly threaded to the original comment so you could see what exactly people were arguing about. I forget why we got rid of it.
Several years ago, I got offered another job that was kind of a lateral move, but I was kind of stagnated and tired of my current job so I decided to take it. I gave notice to my current employer, took the drug test for the new employer, and was in the process of cleaning out my office. My current employer came back with a serious counter-offer: more money, stock options, a potential bonus, and more opportunity going forward. I decided to stay and had to go back to the new employer and decline the job. They were nice about it, but I think both they and I knew that this was a really burned bridge. I would never be able to seek a position at that company again. It worked out. I stayed at my current company and eventually retired from there. When I decided to leave, I said it wasn’t about the money. Turns out if there is enough money, then it really is about the money.