What's Wrong with Taking a Counter Offer

For those of you who follow football, you had to enjoy the recent Super Bowl - regardless of whether your team won or lost. What a game! Although my team lost, me and most of Patriots Nation quickly shifted our interest from losing the big game to whether the rumors of both our offensive- and defensive coordinators leaving were true.

Well, as you may know, our defensive coordinator has been named the head coach of the Detroit Lions, and our offensive coordinator, Josh McDaniels, was named the head coach of the Indianapolis Colts. "Was" is the key word because less than 1 day later, he accepted a counter offer from the Patriots. As a recruiter, I couldn't help but see the parallels to the current state of employment.  

With white-collar unemployment down to 2%, companies are struggling to fill their current openings. One of their top ways of addressing this is to try to prevent people from leaving. Unfortunately, those last-ditch efforts (aka counter-offers) rarely fix the concern(s) that had a candidate looking for a new role in the 1st place.  

Most candidate interviewing processes start out with concerns re: their _________(fill in the blank - usually things like boss, declining industry, company, lack of upward mobility, etc.). It's rare that any of the top 3 concerns reference money. Yet, when emotions are high, money (at least on the corporate side) often seems to be the thing that keeps a candidate from leaving.  

Unfortunately, candidates rarely think about what this decision means for their future. Similar to the Patriots' offensive coordinator, candidates mark themselves as somebody:

• that can be bought
• that is disloyal
• that can't be trusted

The list could go on and on. Likewise, they burn bridges elsewhere. According to the article on MSN, The Josh McDaniels U-Turn: Coach Abandons Colts After Patriots Convince Him to Stay, Josh McDaniels will have a hard time landing another head coaching job elsewhere for fear that he will leave the next team at the alter, as well.

Candidates may think they work in a huge industry where nobody else will know. Ha! If you work in the same industry, trust me when I say that word gets around.  

Josh McDaniels has accepted a counter-offer with nothing but verbal promises (at least publicly). That is how most counter-offers work. Fortunately, or unfortunately, most candidates realize quickly whether those intentions of fixing things are genuine, or whether the company was simply buying time so they could make the change when it's more convenient for them.  Too often it's the later. I'm excited to see how this plays out for Josh!