The Year of the Counter Offer

When I meet a recruiter, I always ask how business is. This week at a local networking event I was surprised to learn 2016 is the year of the counter offer.

This recruiter, who works for a national placement agency, told me recruits are receiving and accepting the counter offer so often (more frequently this year than ever before) her firm has named 2016, “The year of the counter offer.” Seeking new employment as a way to force an employer to give you a raise is so popular this agency is calling it a trend.

She stated despite the great recession having ended a few years ago, many companies continue to be apprehensive about the economy, are reluctant to convert temporary employees to permanent and have not given employees a decent raise in years. Millennials who accepted jobs below normal starting salaries are tired of waiting for a fair wage and are using the counter offer as a salary negotiation tool. 

Companies are well aware of how much it costs to hire and train a new employee:

According to Zane Benefits:

Some studies (such as SHMR) predict that every time a business replaces a salaried employee, it costs 6 to 9 months’ salary on average. For a manager making $40,000 a year, that's $20,000 to $30,000 in recruiting and training expenses.

But others predict the cost is even more - that losing a salaried employee can cost as much as 2x their annual salary, especially for a high-earner or executive level employee.

I learned this the hard-way after one of my employees left last year. I now realize it is cheaper in the long run to figure out how to keep employees rather than having to endure the time and cost of recruiting and training someone new.

If you do threaten to leave your job be aware of the potential risks:
 
You may not receive a counter offer:
You or your position may not be as valuable to your employer as you think it is. Also, some employers think everyone is replaceable and have a policy to never give a counter-offer. 

Accepting the counter offer could hurt your reputation:
Most employers have good memories; from this day forward you may be known as the employee who resigned to get a raise.

My company has this employee – he actually accepted a counter offer on two separate occasions. When he was seeking a promotion last year he came very close to not getting it because of reservations as to whether he was management material. Similar to my friend who is known as the 4:00 and she's out of here employee, he is known as the counter offer employee. As he struggles to adapt to his new management role, several managers site his counter offer history as an ignored warning sign.

You are burning bridges:
I accepted the counter-offer when I was in my 20’s. Very similar to the scenario above both a co-worker and I accepted counter-offers after finding new jobs with the same placement firm I referenced above. We had both been warned of the disadvantages of accepting the counter-offer (if we are unhappy now, we will most likely be unhappy six months from now just better paid). We both had liked our jobs, but needed and thought we deserved more money. In both cases, our employer matched our new salary as an incentive to keep us. Unfortunately, a year later we were both out of a job when our entire department was relocated to Chicago. My co-worker regretted her counter-offer decision as she struggled to find another new job. I never regretted mine because I easily found a job on my own, but the agency I had worked with never worked with me again. I am sure there was a "don't work with" note attached to my file.

You may be fired in the future:
If our entire department had not been downsized, I wonder if our jobs would not have been in jeopardy in the future. Assistants were hired for both of us shortly after our counter-offers were put in place without our permission or request. My co-worker’s assistant didn’t work out and left a few months after she was hired. I struggled to keep mine busy (would you train an unwanted assistant to do your job). He was the first person to leave when the department lay-off was announced.

My recommendation:
My company’s economist projects 2016 as a year of slow but steady growth, but 2017 to be a year of contraction. My recommendation is instead of 2016 being the year of the counter-offer make it the year your find a great new job especially if you have a few years of experience. If you wait and are underpaid, underemployed or your company still hasn’t hired you permanently you may be stuck in an undesirable work situation for several years to come.

Have you ever accepted a counter offer? Was it a good decision?

The Adjunct Trap

This month The Savvy Reader Book Club is reading Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus's book Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It. Today’s post is the first in a series of posts I will be writing this month inspired by this book.

The book begins by informing us that the American colleges and universities are bound by a caste system. At the top of the caste are 320,000 associate and full professors, most of whom have tenure or will soon receive that reward. Below them are about 170,000 assistant professors, of which most are on the “tenure track.” The third tier consists of instructors and lecturers who aren’t in line for promotion and who handle introductory sections at modest salaries and benefits. (A number are faculty spouses unable to find other employment). The fourth and fifth castes are made up of part-time adjuncts and graduate assistants. They are the contingent people of the campus - exploitable, disposable, and impoverished by low wages. They do the bulk of the undergraduate teaching at many universities. (Pg. 15)

What is an adjunct?
Adjuncts belong to a diverse group of teachers called contingents, who are hired to take on chores regular faculty members don’t want to do. They come from respected professions like lawyers and film producers who teach one evening course (largely because they enjoy it) or are among the gypsy scholars who commute among as many as four campuses in a single week. Pay rates are shamefully low. The American Federation of Teachers found the average is about $3,000 per course, which means many get less. And of course there are no benefits.

Here is an example of the huge inequality found in the adjunct/professor pay structure:

At Queens College, a branch of the City University of New York, the pay is better than average but the disparities are typical. When students walk into the gleaming building that is Powdermaker Hall, they might see one classroom where a full professor is explaining the economic ideas of the Nation’s founders. He’ll earn $116,000 for six classes taught over nine months-$17,000 per course. In the very next room is an adjunct teaching political theory to thirty bright-eyed freshmen. But she gets a flat fee of $4,600, admittedly higher than the national average, but so is the urban cost of living. Moreover, the professor has health insurance, sick days, sabbaticals, and a hefty TIAA-CREF pension. The adjunct’s benefits are akin to W.C. Field’s reward in The Bank Dick- “a hearty handshake.” (Pg. 48-49)

Adjuncts are not respected:
Many adjuncts are not respected by the salaried faculty members and administrators and are not perceived as part of the campus community.

Why is adjunct teaching a trap?
Many women think they can have families and stay in the game by adjuncting. They get trapped there. Age and time trap them. Vagabonding from job to job isn’t so terrible when you’re young, but it takes a toll on you as they get older. In another example sited, an adjunct teacher tried to cobble together a livelihood by teaching sixteen “distance” courses. Online teaching, she said, was tougher than face-to-face instruction, because if you do it seriously, “you never get a break from it. You almost sleep with your computer. (Pg. 54)

The sad fact is it is difficult to earn a living wage teaching as an adjunct even when you teach multiple classes.

What are the chances an adjuncts position will morph into full-time?
Many years of adjuncting wouldn’t count as valuable classroom experience. Rather, for most, it’s a black mark. This was borne out by an informal survey Angelo Gene Monaco, the vice president for human resources at the University of Akron, performed. Out of curiosity, he surveyed sixty heads of departments at a sample of Midwestern colleges. Only three told him they’d even consider hiring a contingent for a full-time post. Monaco created quite a stir at the 2008 meeting of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources when he declared: “We’ve helped create a highly educated part of the working poor.” (Pg. 53)

A real life example:
Which brings me to Kate; I’ve previously written about Kate’s disillusionment with her job after she was repeatedly passed over for promotion. Kate has since abandoned her dream of being a controller or CFO and refocused her energies on becoming a full-time teacher at a local college. She taught her first adjunct class last semester – an introductory business course.

Initially, Kate was extremely frustrated by the lack of support she received from the college. She had difficulty setting up her email, accessing the school’s intranet, and even getting a ‘teacher’s edition’ of the book. She earned $2,600 to teach the class which met once a week for four hours. She took a week of vacation from her day job to prepare and lost sleep fretting about whether to send emails to students who hadn't turned in their homework.

Next semester she is contracted to teach this class again along with a 12-week accounting class. Surprisingly, the 12-week class pays the same as the 6-week class; it too meets once a week, but for three and a half hours instead of four. I can’t imagine the accounting class taking any less time to prepare, so there goes another week of vacation.

Has Kate fallen for the adjunct trap?
Unfortunately, after reading this book I think she has.  I told her what I had learned from the book, but she refuses to listen. My experience has been when someone wants something badly they rarely listen to naysayers.

What do you think?  Is adjunct teaching a trap?

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