You are offered a new position with a company that will allow career growth, opportunity, and more money.  After careful deliberation and much soul searching, you have accepted, or decided to accept, the new position.  However, upon tendering your resignation, your current boss asks you to stay.  This appeal is known as a counter-offer. These temptations create confusion and buyer's remorse.  The fear of change emotion takes over.  Career changes are tough enough because you are about to leave a comfortable job, friends, location, etc. for an unknown opportunity where you have to prove yourself all over again.  Fear of change can cloud the best of logic.  No matter how good the new opportunity is - it can sometimes seem more comfortable to stay.

Of course, we all think we are irreplaceable, and want to believe all the flattery, but accepting a counter-offer appeal to stay is ultimately not in your best interests.  

	What type of company do you work for if you have to threaten to resign before they give you fair market value for your skills.
	Where is the money for the counter offer coming? Is it your next raise early?  (All companies have strict wage and salary guidelines which must be followed).
	Your company will start looking for a new person at a lower salary price, immediately. The wheels are in motion to replace you, ASAP.
	You have now made your employer aware that you are unhappy. From this day  on, your loyalty will always be in question.
	When promotion time comes around, your employer will remember who was loyal, and who wasn't.
	When times get tough, your employer will begin the cutback with you.
	The same circumstances that now cause you to consider a change will repeat themselves in the future, even if you accept a counter offer.
	Statistics show that if you accept a counter offer, the probability of voluntarily leaving in six months or being let go within one year is extremely high. National statistics indicate that 89% accepting counter offers are gone in 6 months.
	Accepting a counter offer is an insult to your intelligence and a blow to your personal pride, because you know that you were bought.
	Once the word gets out, the relationship that you now enjoy with your co-workers will never be the same. You will lose peer group acceptance, and forever be that defector who was bought back!

Copyright � Sirona Consulting Ltd 2006