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Never accept a counter-offer

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Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#81

Post by bunderbunder »

Clubber wrote: post #40
GuiA wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on why you got a counter offer in the first place. Accepting a counter offer because you told your boss "I like my job but I'm paid way less than some other companies would be willing to pay me, can we do something about it?" is a very sane thing to do.

That's not a counter offer, that's asking for a raise. Counter offer is when you get an offer from another company and tell your boss you want to leave, but your boss makes a counter offer to keep you to stay.

At many companies there are HR policies that make it extremely difficult for your manager to just give you a raise. Oftentimes these policies don't apply to counteroffers. I don't have any opinion on whether this is a good idea or not, but I do think that getting an offer somewhere else can at least be a plausible strategy - possibly the only plausible strategy - for getting a decent raise if you find yourself working at such a company.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#82

Post by fecak »

argonaut wrote: post #45
fecak wrote: post #18

Recruiter here, almost 20 years. Do a search for articles warning about counteroffers and you'll find almost all are written by agency recruiters. Why is that? It's because agency recruiters lose probably millions in fees every year when candidates accept a counter. I have personally lost 30K on a single fee due to counteroffer on more than one occasion. It hurts quite a bit - that's a car - which is why if you accep…

The author is not an agency recruiter. So this hardly seems relevant to his post.

The poster is the author, and in this thread he posted the type of recruiter cited (and recruiter reported) surveys that I refer to in my comment. I wasn't suggesting the author is a recruiter. Only that the usual source of these types of opinions (and the source of the supposed data) is almost always an agency recruiter.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#84

Post by hibikir »

slg wrote: post #33
gozur88 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got really lucky. Normally when a company extends a counter offer what they're doing is buying time to ease you out on their terms.

I always hear this, but where do you people work that this is the case? As some who has been on the other side of the table this was never how it worked. Losing a team member sucks. A counter offer is an attempt to avoid that. The idea that your boss would secretly interview your replacement before firing you just seems silly to me. At the most practical level doing something so cold hearted would send every other me…

Giving the counteroffer anyway will get every other member of your team searching for a job. There's this company I stayed at for a whole 6 months. I came in after negotiation a sensible salary: Nothing spectacular, but still pretty good. Early inquiries at the job made me realize I was paid 25K more than any of my teammates! While I was the most senior, I wasn't quite that far ahead: They were getting underpaid. Realizing this too, one of them quit, and got a counteroffer to be paid just like I was. News spread like wildfire, and entire teams were interviewing out there. Some people stayed with the counteroffers, but many were lost.

When you are not paying people what you are really willing to pay them, eventually they'll learn about this, and hell will break loose. You either have to change the way you pay, or be OK with losing people. Counteroffers get you the worst of both worlds, and on top of that, they are wonderful sources of lawsuits in the long run, as the people that won't complain are typically women and minorities.

The one counteroffer that make sense is to go and say 'look, now we realized that we are underpaying, but we want to keep you all, so we are doing an immediate salary review'. You still look like someone that isn't on the ball, but at least you show you are trying to have equitable pay.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#86

Post by fecak »

gregpilling wrote: post #79
jonaf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make $30,000 USD for placing a person??? I'm in the wrong line of work.

Yes you can. Its a great job when people are hiring, you have lots of income. When the jobs vanish during a recession, you don't make any money and starve. If you are able to manage the up and down cycle, its great.

I've been through two periods of it being bad (2000 and the later recession) but I managed to do well enough. Lots of recruiters leave the market during the down cycles, and when it's up we get tons of newbies. You only need a phone/email and a LinkedIn account to jump in the field at the lowest level.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#87

Post by xenadu02 »

jonaf wrote: post #44
fecak wrote: post #18

Recruiter here, almost 20 years. Do a search for articles warning about counteroffers and you'll find almost all are written by agency recruiters. Why is that? It's because agency recruiters lose probably millions in fees every year when candidates accept a counter. I have personally lost 30K on a single fee due to counteroffer on more than one occasion. It hurts quite a bit - that's a car - which is why if you accep…

You can make $30,000 USD for placing a person??? I'm in the wrong line of work.

Eh it's like selling houses in San Francisco. You only do a few a year so the high commissions need to sustain you. Plus the market goes up and down and you need to save enough from commission to cover market downturns.

All that said really good recruiters are well paid.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#88

Post by setr »

ryandrake wrote: post #52

Do you want to keep working in a place where the only way to get a substantial raise is to threaten to quit? Accepting a counter-offer basically encourages this bad behavior on the part of companies, and I would not accept one on principle. When you get a counter-offer, whatever they say, you should be hearing "Ahh, we got away with paying you this little for so long--now I suppose we have to pay you market rate."

What it's more of is that your rate of pay-raise doesn't actually match the market-rate. You were hired presumably at market rate, and your pay has presumably gone up/down based on a percentage of that initial rate. Especially if the market is volatile, there'll eventually be a significant discrepancy.

And now you have some new company who is paying the market rate, in other words, evaluating your position against the total market. Your company, which was at best evaluating your position within their own corporation, is now forced to do a market-scale re-evaluation. With the poaching offer as the baseline, since you've been tagged by someone as being worth that much (and willing to pay it).

And now you've got a big boost in pay. Not because your C_Os were gathering together in the dark halls of the Bedlam basements, black robed, circled around the Sefer Raziel Ha-Malakh Liber Razielis Archangeli, poring over your employee review, whispering amongst themselves "yes, yes, he's a quiet man; he won't complain and he won't tire; give him a penny more and he won't trouble another year; the fucking fool".

All it is is that there was never a reason to do more work than necessary. And no reason to pay more than necessary.

Y'know, don't programmers have a similar saying?

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#89

Post by cgio »

ryandrake wrote: post #68
archildress wrote: post #13

This couldn't have come at a better time, as I just navigated this last week. I kind of disagree with most of what the author is saying. Here's why. The author posits that you've begun looking for a new job for a reason. There are things that you dislike about your job. That's logical, and it's the number one reason that I went on a search of my own. The problem is that there's always some level of information asymme…

> And when I notified my current employer that I was leaving, they reminded me of how valued I was with the package that they put together. Yea, you were so valued that they DIDN'T offer it to you until you threatened to leave. That doesn't sound like an employer that values you, it sounds like an employer who got away with a great bargain while it lasted.

Every employer does that given the opportunity. Their side of the deal is paying you the least amount you will agree to in an arms length transaction. i hate it too, as an employee, but viewing your employer as a socialist daddy won't get you far. There may be some of this kind in the market, but very few.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#90

Post by fecak »

tptacek wrote: post #66

I'm not a recruiter (anymore?) and I will say that I think the advice in this post is pretty important. I've had two bad experiences with being tainted after accepting a counter, and the logic behind why that happens is extremely straightforward. Clearly, there's a lot of dramatic license built into the word "never" in the title (a less baity title would be "Be wary of counter-offers"). Clearly, there are employers t…

I think it's important to differentiate what type of counter it is and whether or not it solves the problem reasonably. A counter can be a pay raise, new role/promotion, or even something like letting someone telecommute. Those are all very different scenarios, and the stereotypical "walks into managers office with shiny offer from competitor demanding more" may have less positive long-term results than the more common less aggressive approach.
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