Here are a few things you should consider before considering one: 

Career changes involve tough decisions. Dealing with the anxiety of leaving a comfortable job, good friends and the worry of needing to prove yourself again in an unknown environment. This is why it can be tempting to stay in your current role if you are given a counteroffer. DO YOU STAY OR DO YOU GO? Counteroffers are a tricky subject and Oliver Parks has been witness to many different versions over the years. 

Staying with your current employer may well be the right thing to do for your career, equally, taking on a new challenge may be the right move for you to make. The key is to make sure you think through the pros and cons thoroughly and do this well before the time comes to resign. If you don’t and you are uncertain when you hand in your resignation, you may compromise yourself in a number of ways.  

First things first: WHY are you leaving? 

What MOTIVATIONS do you have to leave your current employer? Before exploring new opportunities, it is important to have a clear understanding about why you want to leave your job. Is your decision based on compensation? Recent cultural changes? Poor leadership? If the motivations behind your decision to leave are unclear, you will naturally find yourself insecure about moving to a different environment and perhaps confused by the factors that are important to you when deciding whether to take on a new role at a new company.  

It is good practice to write down the REASONS you are feeling unhappy about your current role and consider having a conversation with your line manager to check if small issues can be dealt with simply and effectively. This conversation should happen well before you find yourself in a position of having to decide to accept any new offer from a new employer. If you’re being headhunted, write down the positive aspects of the job being offered and why they look like a better match for your career in the long term - making these ideas clear in your mind will increase your confidence to address any concerns you have with your current role with your line manager.  

You will be offered great benefits and feedback: But why NOW? 

Here is a classic one, after giving some thought to your current situation and having made your decision to leave you go to resign. Your employer now tells you about the positive impacts you bring to the team and all the great plans they had for you - all the things you wanted to hear over the past few years but they were obviously too busy to share with you. So WHY ARE THEY TELLING YOU THIS ONLY NOW?            

We are human, we naturally thrive on positive feedback as it makes us feel valued and appreciated. Employers are aware of this and will naturally praise you in order to convince you to stay. They are also likely to deny the negative issues that brought you to this conversation in the first place. The truth is, offering you improved benefits, or a higher salary is far CHEAPER than addressing the problem. WAIT, WHY? Simply, it is because offering you a counteroffer is less stressful and expensive than having to recruit someone new to fit the role. On top of the cost of recruiting someone they will have to invest a significant amount of time and therefore money into training someone new. This is compounded by the fact that they need to recruit someone as a reaction to an event rather than in a planned way. Finally, the person the recruit and train may well not work out meaning they will have to go through the whole process again. ALSO CONSIDER THIS: why would you want to stay with a company that needed to be threatened by your resignation to demonstrate how much they care about you? 

Why accepting a counteroffer may cause career suicide? 

This is a little dramatic, but let’s face it, no matter what the company tells you when offering you a counteroffer, you are now considered a FIDELITY risk. You have demonstrated that you are attentive to other opportunities in the market and, perhaps, you can’t offer 100% commitment to the long-term objectives the business is trying to achieve. In more severe cases, you also lose your status as a ‘team player’ and potential promotions will be usually reserved to those who show long-term commitment. 

 Your attempted resignation could also look very negative to your boss, as it can impact the levels of retention in the team. In this case, companies rely on counteroffers as a temporary strategy to keep you onboard until they have someone in mind to replace you. A number of studies show that a very high percentage of employees remaining with their employers after a counteroffer leave their role within a year or at least start to seek new opportunities within six months, as the initial issues are rarely addressed in the end.   

Our advice: Compare both offers and make sure your decision is clear before you go through the resignation process: 

Counteroffers usually take the form of more money, promotions and promises of future considerations - but your reasons to leave still exist. Can those benefits address the issue? THIS MIGHT HELP: when making your decision, look at your current job and the new position as if you were unemployed which opportunity holds more potential? Which opportunity is aligned with your long-term goals? Probably the new one, or you would not be considering it in the first place. 

 Communicating your decision might also bring a lot of discomfort. You want to leave on good terms, so avoid having LONG CONVERSATIONS and opening the conversation up to questions about the new employer. You should highlight that you have given a great deal of thought to this new opportunity and, whilst you grateful for the time spent with the employer, the new opportunity offers you the professional development or opportunity that you are looking for and you have considered your decision to resign very carefully. Ask them to respect your decision. Clear and well thought out decisions are usually accepted.

What your thoughts? Have you been in any of these situations before? 

Career decisions are never easy ones to make, but I hope these ideas have contributed to a better understanding of counteroffer consequences. Make the best decision for you – and don’t look back.

 About Oliver Parks

Oliver Parks offers search-based recruitment solutions to the technology sector, specialising in ERP, CRM, e-commerce, Business Intelligence, Mobile Development. Data Science & Engineering, Cloud Computing, Web Development, Content Management and Cyber Security. The firm’s multilingual consultants operate in narrowly-defined niche market segments, enabling them to gain extensive knowledge of the people and companies operating in each technology.  Oliver Parks has a proven track-record with more than 100,000 candidates worldwide and more than 300 clients globally.