Up the ante with a rival job offer

In the current tight market, it is not uncommon to be headhunted if you have made a good name for yourself.

Often the approach comes out of the blue and you turn it down because you like where you are. But you'd be mad if you didn't make it work for you. Your employer should know your talents are appreciated. The question is how.

It is commonly agreed that it is dangerous to use a job offer as leverage in your current position if you wouldn't seriously contemplate accepting it. You may just find that your employer doesn't want to try too hard to keep you and wishes you well, in which case you are in the awkward position of taking a job that you might not even want.

"You have to be prepared to go - don't bluff," says Dr Marie Wilson, head of Management Employment Relations at the University of Auckland business school.

Recruitment consultants take a jaundiced view of employees who are constantly getting job offers in order to improve their salaries and packages. They recommend to their employer clients that these kinds of people are unlikely to stay in their position for any period of time and should be allowed to leave.

Wilson herself was approached a number of times last year by international institutions. She says once you negotiate a better position - in her case she went from being an associate professor to a department chair - you will be expected to stay for a good three to five years.

Corporate executives who seek out offers in order to further their careers can get a bad name for themselves, but there are some company cultures where this is the only way to get ahead, says Wilson.

A colleague in America was complaining to his boss about his low salary and his employer said to him, "get another offer, show me the market values you and then we will talk about improving your package".

"Letting your employer know that you have had a job offer, no matter if you turned it down, is probably not silly," says Wilson. "Particularly if you have not gone looking for it, it's a way of saying, "Gee, other people notice me," she says.

Looking at it from the employer/recruitment consultant's point of view, Sean Brunner, manager of the Robert Walters recruitment consultancy in Wellington, has some warnings about the ambitious person looking for advancement through job offers from rivals.

"People that resign are generally not entirely happy. Can you realistically change the reasons for this?... If a candidate has employed this tactic to solicit a better salary, they may have mentally and emotionally left the company anyway," he tells his clients.

"Counter-offers are usually stop-gap measures and may simply be avoiding the inevitable. Don't set a precedent where people have to threaten to leave in order to get offered more money.

"Remember that employees do talk to each other," he says.

Robert Walters warns employers to be suspicious of hiring people who are obviously "tyre kickers".

They give themselves away by being far too interested in the salary but not particularly in the job, being hard to pin down when arranging meetings and, when asked to actively participate in the recruitment process, giving a lacklustre performance.

Brunner is not impressed by people who manoeuvre job offers just to earn an extra $5000 or $10,000.

"People just moving for an extra $5000 or $10,000 need to have a good look at themselves.

"They are never going to sort out other issues," he says.

On the other hand in today's competitive job environment, Brunner agrees it is worth knowing your market worth. The recruitment consultant says he is placing people in jobs where they are earning $20,000 or $30,000 more in similar positions to the one they were in. He says it is about (certain) employers realising where the market is, more than other bosses.