Why IT Companies Resort to Counteroffers

Lia Mihut
Lia Mihut ↓ 1 minute read
Nov 29, 2017
Read 234 times
IT

Considering the great implications and the effects that this practice has on the parties involved, I believe that it’s important to look at this phenomena from multiple angles. For an IT company, whose employee is on the brink of leaving, a counteroffer is a very frequently used tool to address the issue. And there are several reasons for it, that all come down to costs.

The costs with an unforeseen vacant senior developer position are often times bigger than a quick fix salary raise. And the main 2 reasons are that:

  • The IT recruitment marketplace in Romania is highly competitive; recruiting a senior developer can take longer than 3 months at times, large number of interviews and offer making, and so on
  • The other employees in the team will be overloaded with work tasks and delays in the project delivery are highly probable

In order to reach the project goals and meet the deadlines, the team will be overdriven, ultimately leading to a highly demotivated team, emotionally, mentally and physically altogether.

In other words, when a senior colleague leaves, it impacts the state of being of the entire team, due to the extra tasks allocated, in compensation. The yield will eventually decrease as well as the quality of work.

The Impact on the Employer-Employee Relationship

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When an unexpected resignation is presented, the other thing that happens is a violation of the psychological contract between the employer and the employee. And this will forever impact the relationship between the two.

The employer will always come to doubt the trust that he puts in this particular employee, expecting a new resignation at any time. He will also doubt the way in which he communicates and interacts with the employee.

Incertitude and hesitation will also rise when it comes to investing him with a key role in a project or advancing him as team lead. Considering the fact that the employee has not been sincere and upfront about his job dissatisfaction in the past, this will be highly unlikely to happen, marking time on both sides and eventually getting into a rut.


This is the first article from the series, stay tuned for next week's sequel. To be continued...

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