A poll by headhunting firm Hays found that only 4% of Singapore employers surveyed in a recent poll said that it is company policy to make a counter-offer to key or promising employees when they quit, even though 65% say they ‘sometimes’ resort to it to stop staff from leaving.
Nearly a third of the bosses have even indicated they have dropped any policy pertaining to counter-offers.
Elsewhere in the region, just 5% of companies in Hong Kong have a counter-offer policy to retain staff, while 24% have abandoned it. This compares to 3% of Japanese companies which have counter-offer policies and 32% who have dropped it. Some 71% of employers in Hong Kong still occasionally make a counter-offer to staff who resign as compared to 65% of Japanese companies.
Chris Mead, Hays managing director in Singapore, said a counter-offer policy is not very effective because staff have already made up their minds to leave the company. A counter-offer will merely delay the employee’s departure at most.
Yet Hays has predicted the return of counter-offer in Asia as the war for talent heats up in the year ahead.
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