If you resign your job, and your existing employer offers you a better package or a different job to stay; this is called a Counter-Offer. If you are thinking about accepting a counter offer to stay in a job when you’ve already resigned, or you’re thinking of using a potential employer’s job offer to get your current company to pay you more money read on.
We have over 200 cumulative years of experience at Wynne Consulting and we are regularly faced with these situations.
In the vast majority of situations, using another job offer as a bargaining chip to get more money may be tempting, but it usually ends badly. If you want a salary increase/promotion, then negotiate it on your own merits; or prepare to move jobs.
Whenever we broach this subject, we always get feedback along the lines of “You’re a recruiter, it’s in your personal interests to dissuade candidates from accepting counter-offers as you will lose your fee”. This maybe the case with other recruiters, but for us this is not the case and is missing the point.
I was chatting to my father over the weekend about his experiences of job “interviews” in the 1960’s when he first left college. Morose interviewers firing open questions over an imposing oak desk whilst portraying the demeanor of a disinterested headmaster thinking “why on earth should I bother giving you a job?”.
This kind of arrogant interview style was commonplace where there is a rich choice of candidates to employ; where jobs are few and interviewees are plentiful.
Fast-forward to 2014 and the vast majority of the market sectors we operate in genuinely struggle to identify and recruit the top talent in their sector. A shortage of highly skilled people coupled with an improving economy and falling unemployment makes the battle for talent even more intense.
As 2021 draws to a close it’s a great time to reflect on your professional life. Most of us spend more time at work than with their immediate family; so now’s a good time to reflect on where you are at with your career. This can be looking for new opportunities within your company, changing your location of work or even more dramatic changes such as changing the industry in which you work. You may be on the search for your dream job, or maybe just a “stepping stone” to get you out of university and onto the job market to enable you to work your way up.
Either way, your CV is the first thing that potential employers see, so it has to represent you in the best possible way. The average amount of time an employer spends initially looking at your CV is 30 seconds. Capture their attention in that short time window and they will delve deeper; miss the boat and they will likely move on.
At Wynne Consulting we see hundreds of CV’s every day. The biggest mistake preventing you writing a strong cv is if you fill your CV’s with every single activity, skill or job you have ever had onto one page instead of focusing on creating a logical and compelling story of your career. Just recently I was reviewing a 12-page CV that started out with the following:
“My skills include marketing, social media, project management, accounting, tax law, employment law, financial management, sales strategy, 6 Sigma, operational effectiveness, advertising operations and software sales. I’ve also published two novels and took a few months off to write a poetry book in 2018.”
As a specialist search recruiter we are continually asked by clients to recruit highly skilled people with specialist skill-sets throughout the UK and Europe.
The nature of the high technology marketplace is that individual expertise and a collective capability of your people to deliver top quality solutions are the fundamental strengths of all successful businesses.
The critical part of that process is a companies’ ability to hire and retain top quality talent from a competitive marketplace. The other companies that you compete with are all looking to hire the same people so your ability to identify and hire the people you need often is the key difference between success and failure.
As a bit of fun – here’s a quick test to find out whether you need a search company or a recruitment agency. It’s 3 points for “Yes”; 2 points for “Maybe” and 1 point for “No”:
Do you have difficulty recruiting good people?
In your sector – do you perceive the top people never talk to recruitment agencies about career progression?
Did it take more than 2 weeks to find the right person for your last recruitment exercise?
In your experience, do recruitment agencies struggle to understand your business and what your requirements are?
Does it frustrate you that recruitment agencies seem to promise a lot, but deliver little in terms of quality motivated candidates you can interview?
Everyone knows how the process works. You need the right CV to get a job interview. And if the CV isn’t up to scratch – no job interview.
So – you need to build a CV for each individual job? But that’s easier said than done…………………
Top UK search recruiter Wynne Consulting are here to give you some guidance on how to best align your experience with each particular job. So – what if:
I was chatting to a client last week who we’ve worked with for many years and he was telling me about a conversation he had with a recruitment agency. They told him they could find him the people he needed to grow his business. He asked them how they found people to which they replied they use advertising and CV Website & job boards.
The problem is top performing people in any industry don’t need to “look” for a job by posting their CV online, or replying to job ads.
For most of them, career opportunities come to them through their reputation in the industry.
Wynne Consulting has spent many years nurturing and developing our network of contacts in the market sectors we service; so we are able to give our clients access to the top talent in their market sector, so giving them the competitive edge in the most important area of all – the quality of their people.
So. Can your existing recruitment supplier do this? If not, talk to Wynne Consulting today to explore how we can give you the competitive edge.
Failure is the crucial learning tool that everyone needs in order to progress and succeed. If you’re afraid of failure you’ll never progress. You’ve got to fail sometimes to succeed overall.
We love the following quote from US basketball superstar Michael Jordan:
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I’ve lost almost 300 games.
26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed.
I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.”
