They’re Looking After Themselves; Not You
What employers don’t tell you is how much it actually costs to replace you. Even by offering you a $20K pay-rise, they are usually saving themselves over $50K in having to replace you. These include advertising, agency fees, loss of productivity and temporary staffing solutions. Unless they are offering you a $70K pay rise, you’re actually being short-changed.
Value Recognition
It was only after making the threat to leave that anything was done to improve your working life. It defies logic that you should have to threaten to go elsewhere before your value is recognised.
It’s a Financial Band-Aid
Very rarely is a decision to leave a job purely about the more material factors. Usually, when asked about why people want to leave it’s things like poor culture, personnel disagreements, not enough development and general frustration. None of these are solved with more money or a change in title. Even if they can remove you from people you don’t like, the culture cannot be changed for just one person. You’ll still be frustrated.
The Honeymoon is Over
It sounds like a bad dating show, but when you quit a job, you’re basically breaking up with your boss and company after cheating on them behind their backs through interviewing elsewhere. That unspoken trust that existed previously is now gone. As a result, even if you accept the counter offer, that trust can never truly be what it was before. The relationship suffers and your work environment will too.
Job Security? Not Anymore
You may have received a whole slew of new additions to your package, but guess whose name is at the top of the list to be let go if the company has financial problems? Yours. We’ve even seen examples where counter offers have been accepted and in a rather Machiavellian way, the company made the counter offer to give them time to find a replacement. The trust is gone, and so too is your job security.
Credibility Damaged
You had already made the decision to accept a role with a different company. When you accept a counter offer you’re being indecisive with not just one company, but two. The offer you accepted will not remain open and in most cases they won’t interview you again in the future. That bridge will have been burnt as they remember you as the person who mucked them around last time.