The Talent Division
Recruitment insights, career advice, and industry news from our team.
One of the most common questions clients ask me is: "Should we make a counter offer?" The honest answer? Sometimes, but not always. The important question isn't whether you can persuade someone to stay. It's whether you've addressed the reason they wanted to leave in the first place.
Most employers worry about attracting great people. Far fewer spend enough time thinking about how to keep them. The truth is, replacing a valued employee is expensive. Recruitment costs, lost productivity, onboarding and the impact on the wider team all add up far quicker than many businesses realise. The good news? People don't always leave for more money. More often than not, they leave because something else has been missing for a while.
How long does it take your business to hire? Two weeks? Six weeks? Three months? For many businesses, recruitment is something that gets squeezed between meetings, projects and the day job. Before you know it, weeks have passed, interviews are still being arranged, and your ideal candidate has accepted another opportunity. The reality is that the longer a vacancy remains open, the more it costs your business. And I'm not just talking about recruitment fees.
It's easy to become fixated on finding the "perfect CV." The perfectly formatted document. The flawless career history. The candidate who appears to tick every single box. But after nearly 30 years in recruitment, I've learnt that great hiring isn't about finding perfect CVs. It's about finding the right people.
Most hiring managers spend a lot of time preparing interview questions. Far fewer spend time thinking about the experience they're creating for the candidate. After nearly 30 years in recruitment, I've seen fantastic businesses miss out on exceptional people, not because the salary wasn't competitive or the role wasn't attractive, but because the interview process let them down.
If I had a pound for every job advert I've read over the years that starts with "We are seeking an enthusiastic, highly motivated individual...", I'd probably have retired by now. The truth is that most job adverts don't fail because they're badly written. They fail because they only describe the role. They forget to sell the opportunity. When someone is considering a career move, they're asking themselves one simple question: "Why should I choose this company over every other one?" If your advert doesn't answer that question, you're making it much harder to attract the right people.
If there's one thing I've learnt after nearly three decades in recruitment, it's this: The best candidates aren't always looking. It's probably one of the biggest misconceptions in recruitment. A business decides it's time to hire, invests time writing a job advert, posts it online and waits for applications to arrive. Sometimes that works brilliantly. But increasingly, it doesn't.
