CANDIDATE TIPS AND ADVICE

When you are in the great position of accepting a new sales position, you will invariably be required to inform your current employer of your decision to hand in your notice. Usually (and hopefully) it will result in a cordial discussion about how you will wrap up your desk and clients, as well as establishing when your last day of employment will be.

On occasion, it is not uncommon for your employer to make a ‘counter offer’ in order to keep you. While this can do nothing more than to stroke one’s ego, it is the basis for any candidate to be lured into staying. But is it the best decision to stay? Recent statistics confirmed that as many as 8 out of 10 sales candidates who accept counter offers are back on the market within 6 months! But why? One reason is that it doesn’t take long for the employee to realise that nothing has changed and the initial problem of why they wanted to leave has not been overcome.

You must think carefully about whether staying really solves the initial reasons for wanting to leave in the first place, and then be prepared to resist these powerful tactics used by your employer to trap you into staying. I have put together some reasons below for not accepting the counter offer:

Reasons for Not Accepting a Counter Offer

• You have now made your employer aware that you are unhappy. From this day on your commitment will always be in question.
• When promotion time comes around, your employer will remember who is loyal and who isn’t.
• When times get tough, your employer will begin the cutbacks with you.
• When your employer replaces you after six months and ‘lets you go’, it’ll be harder to turn them around than it was for them to turn you around.
• Accepting a counter offer is an insult to your intelligence. You didn’t know what was best for you.
• Accepting a counter offer is a blow to your personal pride, knowing you were ‘bought’.
• Accepting a counter offer rarely changes the factors that drove you to look for a new job in the first place.
• Where is the money for the counter offer coming from? Is it your next pay rise early?
• Statistics show that if you accept a counter offer, there is an 80 percent chance you will be out of the job within six months.
• What type of a company do you work for if you have to threaten to resign before they give you what you’re worth?
• Why didn’t they pay you that before? It was because they didn’t think you were worth it.
• Why are they paying it to you now? It’s because it’s easier and cheaper for them to keep you for the time being, while they sort the problem out.

As you can see, there are many reasons why accepting a counter offer can be detrimental to your working life. I appreciate that sometimes changing employers and your own reasons for doing so is not always as black and white as this. However, you need to think very carefully about what 6 months down the line will look like if you do accept a counter offer, and unfortunately 80% of the time you will be back on the market!

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