Roughly one in four candidates who reach offer stage on our senior searches receives a counter-offer from their current employer. About half of them accept it. For years our view of what happened next was anecdotal: the occasional call, a year or so later, from someone who wished they had moved.
In 2025 we decided to find out properly. We contacted every candidate who had accepted a counter-offer during one of our searches between January 2019 and June 2024, at least twelve months after their decision.
What we tracked
There were 71 people in the group, across all six of our sectors and both offices. We reached 64 of them, and asked four questions:
Are you still with the employer that countered?
If so, are you actively looking to leave?
What did the counter-offer include beyond pay?
Would you make the same decision again?
The sample is modest, and it is drawn from senior candidates in specialist markets. It is still a more complete picture than most firms have of their own candidates.
Where they were a year later
The headline is straightforward.
45% (29 people) had left the employer within twelve months. The median time to departure was seven months.
25% (16 people) were still in post but actively looking, most of them through another recruiter.
30% (19 people) were still in post and content with their decision.
Of the 29 who left, 12 came back to us, and we placed seven of them. In most cases the role they moved to was comparable to the one they had originally declined. In a few, it was less senior.
On pay, the counter-offers looked generous. The median counter raised base by 12%, against a median external offer of 16%. At the following pay review, most of those who stayed received little or nothing on top.
What separated those who stayed happily
The most useful finding was not the attrition rate. It was the difference between the counter-offers that held and those that did not.
Eighteen of the 64 counter-offers included a real change to the job: a new reporting line, a larger remit, or a promotion with a published effective date. Fourteen of those eighteen people (78%) were still in post and content a year later.
The other 46 counter-offers were money, sometimes with a retention bonus and a promise of future change. Only five of those people (11%) were content a year on.
One general counsel, who accepted a counter from a US healthcare group and left eight months later, put it plainly:
The money arrived in the next payslip. The conversation about the role kept being moved to next quarter. By the third time, I realised the counter-offer had been the conversation.
Why money alone rarely holds
The reasons people gave for leaving were consistent:
the original frustration, usually about scope, leadership or direction, had not changed
they felt their loyalty was now in question, particularly with their direct manager
the pay rise reset expectations, and the next review was flat
the external offer had made the gap visible, and it stayed visible
None of this will surprise anyone who has hired at senior level. What surprised us was the speed. Seven months is a short time to unwind a decision that was meant to settle things.
If you are weighing one now
We are not neutral on this, and we do not pretend to be. But the data points to a fair test. Before accepting a counter-offer, ask whether it changes the thing that made you take the call in the first place.
If it changes the job, in writing, with a date, it may well be the right answer. If it changes only the number, the odds are not in your favour.
And if you do accept, tell the firm that made the offer quickly and honestly. Senior markets are small. Most of the seven people we placed after a counter-offer were able to come back because they had declined well the first time.
