You’ve been offered a great new job. It’s a tough decision but you think it’s time to move on. You inform your company of your decision to resign for a better opportunity and your boss quickly offers you a higher salary, better benefits or a promotion to motivate you to stay. Your current company may be motivated in the short term to ‘show their appreciation’ for you but you have to ask yourself, “Why did it take my notice to force them to take action?” They can’t believe that you aren’t satisfied with your current salary or your future. You feel guilty and are in a quandary. Will accepting the counteroffer be in your best interest?
A company usually presents a counteroffer for the following reasons:
- They need to buy some time while looking for your replacement
- An important project you are working on may be delayed or not get completed
- All of your work and knowledge need to be transferred to a New Hire or others
- It’s cheaper to offer you more than to recruit and train a new employee
- They may lose you to a competitor, which may mean access to the company’s sensitive and confidential information by the competitor
- This will be bad for morale and could cause others to ask for more money or promotion
- After you are made to feel incredibly guilty and disloyal, then they ‘show you the love’, here’s what probably happens next.
Accepting a counteroffer will likely result in:
- Terminating your employment as soon as they find a replacement
- Your ‘disloyalty’ to the company may affect your relationship with supervisors and co-workers
- Decreased job satisfaction
- You may be identified as the first to go during lay-off periods, not eligible for important or long term projects and the last to be considered during promotions
- Loss of trust for you as a “member of the team”
- Lots of talk and rumor as word gets around
- A recent study by a leading HR firm found that only six out of one hundred employees who accepted their company’s counteroffer were still working for their employers after twelve months.
Remember:
- Money isn’t the major reason most seek another position
- That “new and improved” environment they promise is unlikely to last and the real issue is still there
- Suspicion become the norm
Our advice? You need to carefully weigh any counteroffer with the above considerations before you accept it.
How can we help?
Career Counseling for Job Seekers
Stand out from the crowd!
An expertly written and keyword-optimized resume is the first step in landing a new career, next is knowing how to an ace an interview. Our career counselors can help you every step of the way!