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Counter Job Offer Acceptance: Road to Career Ruin
As we’ve mentioned in other blogs in this series, a counter job offer will always be delivered from a place of desperation from your manager, despite their best of intentions. Should you accept a counter offer? Counter offers are tools which reflect more on the lack of leadership or awareness from your manage than anything else, and they are most definitely not about you, the staff member. Counter job offers are about your boss, and their ability to keep the operational status quo.
Here at Sales Recruiters Dallas we are vehement in our opposition to the counter offer as something you should accept, however, can only urge and advise you on what we think is the right course of action.
Job Acceptance Hack! We refer a lot to an article written in the National Business Employment Weekly by Paul Hawkinson, where he refers to accepting a counter offer as walking the “road to career ruin”.
The piece below could not summarize the risk of accepting a counter offer more.
In his own words:
Matthew Henry, the 17th-century writer said, “Many a dangerous temptation comes to us in fine gay colours that are but skin deep.”
The same can be said for counteroffers, those magnetic enticements designed to lure you back into the nest after you’ve decided it’s time to fly away.
The litany of horror stories I’ve come across in my years as an executive recruiter, consultant and publisher, provides a litmus test that clearly indicates counteroffers should never be accepted— ever!
I define a counteroffer simply as an inducement from your current employer to get you to stay after you’ve announced your intention to take another job. We’re not talking about those instances when you receive an offer but don’t tell your boss. Nor are we discussing offers that you never intended to take, yet tell your employer about anyway as a “they-want-me-but-I’m-staying-with-you” ploy
Interviews with employers who make counteroffers, and employees who accept them, have shown that as tempting as they may be, acceptance may cause career suicide. During the past 20 years, I’ve seen only isolated incidents in which an accepted counteroffer has benefited the employee.
Before you succumb to a tempting counteroffer, consider these universal employment truths:
Any situation in which an employee is forced to get an outside offer before the present employer will suggest a raise, promotion or better working conditions, is suspect.
- No matter what the company says when making its counteroffer, you’ll always be considered a fidelity risk.
- Having once demonstrated your lack of loyalty (for whatever reason), you’ll lose your status as a “team player” and your place in the inner circle.
- Counteroffers are usually nothing more than stall devices to give your employer time to replace you.
- Your reasons for wanting to leave still exist. Conditions are just made a bit more tolerable in the short term because of the raise, promotion or promises made to keep you.
- Counteroffers are only made in response to a threat to quit. Will you have to solicit an offer and threaten to quit every time you deserve better working conditions?
- Decent and well-managed companies don’t make counter offers—ever! Their policies are fair and equitable. They won’t be subjected to “counteroffer coercion” or what they perceive as blackmail.
If the urge to accept a counteroffer hits you, continue to clean out your desk as you count your blessings.