My pet topic is counter offers from three perspectives – the candidate , the employer as well as recruiter.
The employer has been having an exodus at middle and senior levels. and at this point obviously doesn’t want another person at a strategic level or role move out . They best way is to retain the employee by giving them a counter offer and bide their time till they can hire or move another good person into that role. The different ways this is done to retain via a counter are: a salary hike or a promotion or a fancy designation or a promise of a larger role or portfolio “soon”.
At the point where a candidate accepts a job offer, the myriad factors that led him/her to consider a new job reveal just how potent the desire for change really is. Trying to squelch those factors just lead to other problems, or it delays the inevitable until it reaches crisis proportions. Now that the cat is out of the bag. Let the employee go. You can’t fix a bad match by taking back a disloyal partner who has made it clear he wants out.
The candidate is flattered by this counter and feels that the employer has realised his/her worth and feels it is better to stay on with a devil they know than the unknown.
The future periods are marked by the employer’s growing suspicions and by the dearth of loyalty between them. The candidate should not have accepted the counter from his current employer because the factors that drove him away to explore a new job opportunity have not changed.
In the end the company will get a suitable replacement and ease this candidate out.
Should the candidate use a job offer to leverage a counter-offer from his/her current employer? The advice generally is not to. It’s a kind of ransom demand, and if he/she gets a counter it is nothing more than a form of bribe to keep them from leaving until the company is able to replace them. Decide in advance whether you are really ready to leave. And, if you land yourself a job with a good offer with another employer, accept it and move on.
Having interviewed with a new company for a new job and accepting the offer and then turning it down due to the counter from the current employer, also jeopardises future job moves.Many a times at senior levels, such actions are remembered by the people who selected and offered the new job and may tag the candidate as unreliable.
For the recruiter, it is the worst nightmare to hear the word “counter offer”. No disaster compares to an accepted counter offer. He/she would rather suffer a year’s worth of phone rejections than face those four fateful words, “I’ve changed my mind.”
Very often, the current employer is between a rock and a hard place when the candidate announces his resignation. Maybe they can’t afford to lose him/her right now, even though later it might be okay, when it happens under their control.
But there’s more to it, because if the candidate makes a mistake either way, the recruiter bears some of the responsibility, and his/her reputation and business can get hurt.
The recruiter’s advice to candidate is to consider why the sweetening of the pot had not come up before his/her exit discussions with the manager? The promise to promote to a larger role “soon” is a maybe and many a times situations change and this may or may not happen. Once the candidate has retained his current job through the counter, this promised larger role change may take its own time to actually happen.
If he/she accepts the counter,he/she becomes “marked” and is at a risk. In downsizing, he/she may be one of the first to be let go because they were planning to leave anyway. The current employer also knows that they were looking at a change and will always have it at the back of mind in future for any newer projects.
The counter-offer (more money) has to come from somewhere. Most likely it comes from the same budget as the candidate’s next raise. So when the time comes for a raise, he/she may find they have already received it, and are no better off money wise.
The employer will try, quite rationally, to recover its additional investment in the employee who may be surprised that their work load has changed dramatically, and may decide to leave after all.
My view on this is that counter-offers are a big mistake for both the employee and the employer. The urge for change stems from a bad match. A person can work happily at a job for years before feeling the urge to move on. But as soon as he realizes “it’s no longer working out,” the job is a bad match because something has changed.
Madhulika Dant
Linkedin :http://in.linkedin.com/in/madhulikadant
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