Heh, I turned in my resignation at my job once. (Not on a threat tho’) A former employer of mine from Houston was opening up some offices here in Dallas. He offered me buttloads of cash to come work for him.
I agreed, so I turned in my two weeks notice. About a week later the guy I was going to work for got himself arrested for some sort of shady business practices.
The day I found this out, I went back to my old job not feeling good at all because I knew I was going to have to eat crow and ask for my old job back.
Thank Og for small miracles tho’ because once I got to work; before I could say a word to anybody; my boss gave me an offer for a bigger paycheck if I would stay with the company.
To which I could only respond with: “Well,…alright, if you insist.”
If you never ask for a raise how do you get one.However why do they give you one.The only leverage you have is to threaten to leave for greener pastures.if its your first job they always remember how dumb you were the first days.In truth,if you stay in one place a long time it will usually cost you money.
Sort of. Several years ago my organisation was rather light on actuarial skills and we were in the run-up to a very important project for which my knowledge and experience were going to be critically important factors. I mentioned to my manager that I was going to an interview for another position. The next day he told me that I was getting a fairly sizeable pay increase.
I many well-run companies there is an annual review for all employees, at which time annual raises are revealed. It is understood that if you get no raise, or a very small one, that you are being encouraged to seek elsewhere. And vice versa. Again, in professions where there is competition, good management always understands that if their employees are underpaid, the more talented will go elsewhere.
Shoot, if you’re really indispensable to your boss (and you better be sure about this), but are too chicken to ask for a raise, just leave a copy of your resume by the office copier. It won’t be long before the word will spread that you’re shopping around, and your boss will sit you down for a chat.
I sort of threatened to quit and got a raise. At the height of the dot-com boom I told my department manager that I thought I was worth more than I was making, and if I didn’t see some change soon, I’d have to ‘start making big decisions.’ Didn’t say I had another offer, and didn’t have any particular place to go. One month later I got a mid-year raise ($50/week) and soon after got stock options worth a little less than $5K.
You folks at home shouldn’t try this; I think I barely dodged a bullet, but not for lack of aiming at myself.
I was working as a massively underpaid network admin for a small telemarketing company. I told my boss I needed a 20% raise to even consider staying with the company. They offered me a 10% raise. I switched companies, which got me a 50% raise (see above re: underpaid…).
I have a friend who would go to his annual review with a job offer letter from another company. If his supervisor didn’t give him the raise he asked for, he’d show her the offer from the other company. He always got what he asked for.
I did in my early career. But I would never do it now. I believe that my work should be paying me what they think I’m worth. If they won’t, I will go to a company who will. When I *have *quit and been offered a counter-offer, I have always turned them down based on the above principle.
When one of my key workers quit last fall, I was put in the awkward position of having to make a counter-offer. Awkward because, as I say, we should have been paying him what he was worth. He turned down the offer for that reason and others.
Also you may have put the boss behind the eight ball. When people do this it is typically in a high stress situation, a project must be done, and loosing the person threatinging to quit would be a major setback at that time, so the boss will pay ‘anything’ to keep you till the project is over. Once the high stress situation is over then you no longer command that value and the boss can’t justify you staying on, add to that the human factor - as the boss may think you were sticking it to him at the most critical time and now it’s his turn.
Wearing a suit to work and taking a two hour lunch works on the same principle, and avoids looking like you were using company property to look for a job.
Sometimes you don’t even need an offer. For years my bosses insisted that my pay was adequate for my workload, even though I knew that newer employees had less responsibility but higher salaries. I got so fed up that I put my resume on Monster.com and started looking for other editing jobs.
It turns out that my employer used Monster.com to find new employees. It also happens that we had a high rate of turnover last year. All of the advertisements that I received for editorial jobs contained at least one listing for my current employer. I can only guess that my resume kept popping up in the HR recruiter’s mailbox every week as a potential match.
At my annual review last year my supervisors told me that I was getting a bigger raise than the company normally allowed. Apparently they’d “suddenly discovered” that I’d been underpaid for the previous four years. :rolleyes:
The managers in my office have repeatedly told us that a 2 percent annual raise is considered “good” by company standards. Anything higher than that is considered “excellent.” I think this explains the high turnover rate at my office (and why several people have walked out after their annual reviews).
I know, I know … the job search is taking longer than I thought.
As an employee, it is perfectly reasonable to attract another offer, then, if you are interested in staying with your current employer, give them the opportunity to keep you. Even if they will not or can not match or improve on your alternative offer, you get to choose.
Similarly as an employer (if you work for a firm worth working for) I have always encouraged my employees to scout the job market periodically and decide for themselves if their current situation is best for them. As a result, my team is always there because they want to be, and they choose to be. It would really suck to be a manager at a sweatshop.
I got offered a raise when I did quit, if that’s applicable to the question. I wasn’t threatening to quit, or angling for a raise; I just wanted out of the job, and I’d found a much better job. The new job actually paid less to start, but it was closer to what I wanted to be doing. My old boss offered me a substantial raise plus Fridays off if I’d consider staying, but I told him no thanks. It was nice to feel appreciated, though.
I did this once, and was a little disappointed that they didn’t try to persuade me to stay, either by talking things over or by increasing my pay. Some others who’d threatened to quit had had that happen to them. It’s a bit of a letdown to find out that you’re not considered as desirable as your co-workers.
But this wasn’t an exercise in vanity or looking for better pay. The working conditions had become unacceptable where I was, so when they didn’t offer to do anything, I left.
I got an unexpected off-season raise with my last paycheck (four months past first-of-year reviews and raises and two months before my anniversary date).
Turns out this is because I was somewhat irked with my boss on a particular day and muttering to myself over the copier and the lady in charge of such decisions heard my annoyed mutterings and paniced because she’d received an inquiry about my employment history from a headhunter earlier that week.
Now, headhunters constantly troll for people in my position, so her getting an inquiry isn’t at all surprising. I’ve been in my current position just about long enough that I was due to hit the headhunter lists.
Mostly it spazzed her out so badly because my particular boss is what she refers to as a “difficult fit”. In other words, he’s a pain in the behind and I’m the first one they’ve found in years that might be able to cope with him long term - and who he might be able to cope with long term. Also, they’d declined to give me my first-of-the-year review and raise because I’d only been promoted to my current position a couple of months before the end of the year.
