So do 80% of people who accept Counteroffers REALLY leave within 12 months – NO – They still don’t!

About 5 years ago I wrote an article about Counteroffers - you know, where an employer makes an improved offer to an existing employee to convince them to stay, just after they've been offered a new position by a different company. I've decided to update it because I still see the same claim being made on LinkedIn every day.

You'll see a lot of posts of about the subject, always from recruiters, warning the unsuspecting candidate against the temptation of accepting such a transparent inducement to stay as a salary rise.

You see lots of impressive statistics mentioned:

Studies reveal that:

1.??"80% of people who accept counteroffers will leave their current employer anyway within 12 months."

2.??"Two-thirds of those who take a counteroffer leave within 6 months."

And my personally favourite of today

3.??"93% of Professionals who accepted their counteroffer left within 18 months."

Very occasionally sources are quoted – The Wall Street Journal for one – btw go and try and find the original article in the Wall Street Journal - or that famous organisation The National Employment Association – go and try to find their website.

Now, I was a recruiter for over 20 years, and if I may say, a good one - in fact I still work for a some of my old clients when they need me to, so I've placed a lot of people over the years, hundreds, so I've had to deal with my fair share of counteroffers.

Some were accepted, so I know how frustrating a counteroffer can be for a recruiter. Especially when the payment for the placement is contingent on your candidate making a decision not to accept a counter offer and join your client. There can be a lot at stake. Tens of thousands of pounds and the global equivalent.

But I have to tell you something - that claim and its different variants are completely fictitious.

To this day, many of my best friends are recruiters, and I count them among the most hardworking and honest people I know, so this is not a dig at the general recruitment industry, I know the value of the sector, I've used recruiters and I've been a recruiter and I also know that there are many, many other reasons NOT to accept a counteroffer.

But the “Well, you’re going to leave anyway because everybody does” argument is not one of them. Because it's simply not true.

During a conversation in my early days as a rookie recruiter (in the late 90s) I asked a seasoned professional how I could counter the counteroffer issue, and that's when I was introduced to this statistic. You know the "80% leave in 12 months anyway" one. "Have you got the stats on that?" I asked “No, but its a well established fact in the industry." was the reply "Everyone uses it, or a variant of it."

So I spent the next 5 years telling candidates this “fact” without bothering to find out whether there was any truth in it.

However, over a long period of time, I began to notice that my counteroffer accepters weren't leaving in the droves I had expected - 80% weren't leaving in the next 6 months – in fact if anything they were sticking around a bit longer than standard candidates?perhaps due to a sense of loyalty having accepted a healthy salary increase only 6 months ago.

I even started to ask my new candidates, if they had received a counteroffer recently and how they had reacted and whether they left or stayed with their company. This only further reinforced my suspicion that counteroffer accepters were behaving in an identical way to the rest of the population in the timing of their departures from their employers.

So at this point I did try to dig out the raw data that supported this “fact” and I have to tell you – there is absolutely none!

What I did find is plenty of “I had three candidates who all accept counteroffers and they’ve all left”. There’s lots of “Well my cousin James left six months after accepting a counteroffer”. And there’s the thousands of daily LinkedIn articles from recruiters telling you it's true and endless variants on the figure.

But real data, statistically robust data, of a systematic study across a large population, there is zero. And for a statistic that is universally taken as true in the recruitment industry and told to countless candidates every single day around the world in order to influence one of the biggest decisions they'll ever make, in the recruiters favour – that's just not good enough.

So at the end of the day - Does it really matter??????

Well, yes it really does matter – the only reason this is being told to candidates is to influence their decision in the favour of the recruiter. Strange isn't it that it's only recruiters who bother to post about this issue - candidates never do - You never see a post headed "I accepted a counter offer and I'll never do that again." And as the labour market gets tighter and tighter, I'm seeing recruiters use it more and more. Which I why I thought this article needed updating,

The reason recruiters warn about the dangers of counteroffers is because it costs them, and straight in the pocket, when a counteroffer offer is accepted. That invoice they were about to send to their client has just made its way into the trash and that really, really hurts.

But the problem is, once recruiters have convinced their candidate to refuse the counteroffer, based on this fictitious data, they will send their invoice and walk away from this decision. But candidates won't be able to do that.

This decision is one of the most fundamental issues that affect a person and their family. Where they are going to work can have huge impacts on their quality of life. So it NEEDS to be the right decision, not influenced by a fictitious figure dreamt up by someone who thought it would be a useful counter argument when faced with the risk of losing the payout.

So the next time a recruiter tells you not to accept a counteroffer because "Did you know 80% who accept leave in the next 6 months anyway", or 70% of people who accept a counteroffer are back in the job market after 9 months" or whatever the variant-du-jour is, send them to this article, because I have a challenge for them:

The first person who can produce statistically significant data on this - and I'm talking academic study here, not what happened last week in the office - that proves 80% of counteroffer acceptors leave within 12 months (or any similar figure) – I will happily donate ￡250 to a charity of their choice.

My E-Mail is [email protected] - if you would like to accept the challenge. I made the same offer 5 years ago, and the article has been viewed thousands of times, but no one has ever taken me up on it.