After a Counteroffer: How Both Employers See You

A counteroffer feels like a verdict on the person: they tried to leave, the company paid to keep them, so the company must rate them. Employers describe it differently. In a 2025 Australian survey, 85% of employers had made a counteroffer in the past year, and fewer than half said that employee was still with them. In Japan, recruiters say the situation most likely to trigger a counteroffer is that nobody is ready to take over the job.

Why do employers make counteroffers?

Mostly because the seat is expensive to leave empty.

The Japanese data comes from en Japan, which runs a job site for mid-career movers, mainly people in their 30s and 40s. In August 2025 it surveyed 230 recruitment consultants who use the site. Asked when people are most likely to be asked to stay, 65% picked "no successor is available" and 45% picked "the person is in the middle of a project." Consultants could choose more than one answer.

Asked what companies offer, 62% said a pay rise. The second most common answer, at 55%, was a request to stay until a successor is found.

Look at that second one again. It asks for time. The company has already accepted that the person is going.

From the employer's chair the arithmetic is simple. Replacing someone takes months and a recruiting fee. Meanwhile the work lands on colleagues and the project slips. A raise for the person who resigned is usually cheaper than all of that. So the number in a counteroffer measures the cost of the vacancy. It may have little to do with how the company rated the person last year. That is my reading. The survey only gives the percentages.

Retention is not always polite, either. In the same survey 20% of consultants said they had come across retention attempts that amounted to harassment. Among those consultants, 47% cited intimidation by a boss or someone more senior, 44% a refusal to accept the resignation letter or delays in issuing required documents, and 44% a leaving date that kept being pushed back. A company that wants to keep someone because it values them does not need those methods. What it seems to need is a body in the seat.

I have seen people fail to show up at a new company at the last moment for several reasons, and two of them involve the current employer. One is a counteroffer: the old company made one and the person stayed. The other is that the old company gave an expectation that pay would go up later, and the person stayed.

How does the old company see the person afterwards?

As someone who once said they were leaving. A raise does not erase that line.

The consultants in the en Japan survey described cases they had handled. One person at a logistics company accepted the request to stay. Having declared an intention to resign then became an obstacle, and the person was taken off the promotion track. Pay ended up lower. When the person went back on the market, new offers were based on the reduced salary, and the terms were worse than the first time.

Another case went well. Someone who had spent 35 years at one company received an outside offer at a higher salary. During the resignation talks, senior management offered a transfer to a position the person had wanted for some time. The person took it and decided to stay until retirement.

What separates the two, as I read them, is what the company fixed. In the second case the reason for leaving was the role, and the company changed the role. When the reason is something other than money and the company only adds money, the reason is still sitting there. I wrote about that in A 50% raise, and he still left.

How many people does a counteroffer actually hold? In the same survey, 62% of consultants said fewer than one in ten of the mid-career people who are asked to stay end up dropping the move.

Employers counter most often when there is no successor

Share of 230 recruitment consultants choosing each answer (%), about mid-career job changers, mainly in their 30s and 40s; the first two questions allowed multiple answers. en Japan, survey on retention attempts at resignation, August 2025

When people are most likely to be asked to stay

• No successor available
  65%
• In the middle of a project
  45%

What the company offers

• A pay rise
  62%
• A request to stay until a successor is found
  55%

Share of those asked to stay who give up the move

• Consultants answering "under 10%"
  62%

The company prices the empty seat first, and few people are held by it.

For what happens after someone stays, the figures with a clear source are Australian. Robert Half surveyed 500 hiring managers there in October 2025 and published the results in June 2026. In the previous 12 months, 85% of employers had extended a counteroffer to an employee with an outside offer. After it was extended, 46% said the employee was still with them, 32% said the employee left within 12 months, and 7% said the employee declined and left.

These are employers reporting on themselves, in another country, so I would not carry the numbers over to Japan. What I take from them is narrower. Even the side that made the offer counts fewer than half as still there.

What does the new employer see when the hire backs out?

First, several lost months. The offer was signed off, the start date was fixed, and the runner-up was told no. Then a message arrives saying the candidate has decided to stay put, and the search starts again. I covered the stretch between offer and start date in Reading Japan's 65% Offer Decline Rate.

Next, the hiring side usually settles on an explanation: our offer was used as leverage. Nobody can check whether that is true. It is the cheapest explanation available, so it is the one most likely to be written in the interview record. If the same person applies two years later, someone will read that line.

A more careful employer audits itself instead. The candidate stayed because the old company supplied something. What was it, and why did our interviews not surface it? Stated reasons for leaving and real ones often differ, as I described in Why exit surveys never tell you why people left. If "I want a bigger scope" was really one failed pay conversation, the reason to move disappears the day the old company finds the money.

The statistic everyone quotes

You have probably read that 80% of people who accept a counteroffer leave within six months. I tried to trace it. I could not find a primary source with a named survey, a year and a sample, so I have left it out. The two surveys above are what I could verify, and neither one supports a number that precise.

What they do support is smaller. The employer that made the counteroffer, counting its own cases, keeps fewer than half. The employer that was turned down loses months either way. Whether that second employer files the episode as leverage or as a question its interviews missed probably says more about its hiring team than about the candidate.

---