Counter Offers: Stop sabotaging your own career growth. Please.

Stop taking counter offers. Stop even considering them. 

We are in a hiring market right now that is indisputably candidate-driven. You are valuable. You have skills that are in high demand but currently are in short supply. While the talent gap will shrink over time, now is the time to take full advantage and leverage your abilities in a move forward.

It is definitely not the time to be looking backward toward a business you have obviously given serious consideration to leaving. You’ve taken all the necessary steps to improve your professional and personal lives—just take the last one.

Need more convincing? Here’s a little push.

The reasons you even thought about leaving probably won’t be resolved.

Let’s look counter offers for what they really are—payoffs. You’re talented. Great at what you do and another business, most likely a competitor, noticed it. If you leave, it will be disruptive. It will cost your current employer a significant amount of time and resources to replace you. So, they raise your pay, and in the short term that seems great, exciting, even—but then where are you?

You are in exactly the same place you were before you considered leaving for a host of reasons. Those factors won’t be resolved and pretty soon the money won’t be enough to ignore the glaring inconsistencies that create a toxic work culture. 

You will no longer be seen as loyal.

Taking counter offers from your current employer puts you in a precarious position. You were thinking about leaving and, while we should all look positively on a professional trying to grow and advance their career, this is often not the case. 

You’re now seen as a liability.

You’ve broken trust by even considering a career shift and that will throw off your chances of any sort of advancement or professional progress. It may seem petty, but you have shown them that leaving is always an option going forward, and therefore they will be less willing to invest in your future success. You are effectively an unreliable resource. 

Avoid unnecessarily burning bridges

You’ve gone this far, you are at the end of a long and costly process and now have decided to go back to a working environment you gave more than serious consideration to leaving. Not only have you situated yourself in an incredibly compromised position, within a company that no longer considers you loyal, but you have burnt a bridge, further limiting your career mobility. 

You are probably not thinking big enough.

Most professionals undervalue their potential contribution to a team and business. By taking counter offers you are cutting yourself off at the knees because change comes with its challenges. Taking risks is the only way to find a professional ecosystem where you can thrive free of all the obstacles you have already obviously noticed. 

At The James Allen Companies, we specialize in helping insurance industry careers grow. Stop settling when you have ample opportunity to move forward. Reach out to one of our recruiters to see where your professional career could go.