You found the right person. The interviews went well, the references checked out, the offer was sent and accepted. Then a week before their start date, the email arrives: they've decided to stay where they are. Their employer made them an offer they couldn't turn down.
If this has happened to you in the last year, you're not unlucky, you're statistically normal. The CIPD's labour market research found that just over half of UK employers using counter-offers as a retention tool say they're using them more than they were twelve months ago. Separate reporting from the Financial Times put the figure at around 40% of UK employers having made a counter-offer in the past year. London employers counter-offer more than anywhere else in the country, with well over half doing it at least once recently. This isn't a rare ambush tactic anymore. For senior commercial and technical hires in particular, it's close to standard practice.
Why this is getting worse, not better
Two things changed. First, the cost of replacing a senior person has gone up enough that most employers will now spend real money to avoid it rather than face a long, expensive search of their own. Second, candidates have got used to seeing two or three live conversations at once, so the moment they hand in notice, their current employer often already knows they have options, because the candidate told them, or because it's obvious from the timing.
None of this is really about the candidate being disloyal or flaky. It's about incentives. Their current manager has every reason to throw money at the problem for a few weeks. You, as the new employer, generally only find out once it's too late to do anything except wait and hope.
What actually happens to people who accept a counter-offer
Here's the part worth knowing if you're tempted to write the candidate off as having made a permanent choice: most of them haven't. The pattern across recruitment data, repeated by enough firms over enough years that it's become close to conventional wisdom in the industry, is that the majority of people who accept a counter-offer are back in the market within six to twelve months. The reasons they wanted to leave in the first place rarely had much to do with salary, and a pay rise doesn't fix a bad manager, a stalled platform roadmap, or a role that's stopped growing.
A counter-offer buys time, not loyalty. The candidate's original reasons for leaving are still sitting there, waiting.
This matters for how you respond. If someone you wanted has just accepted a counter-offer, the relationship doesn't have to end there. A short, genuinely warm message a few months later, not a hard pitch, often lands better than anything sent in the heat of the moment.
What to do differently next time
You can't stop a counter-offer from happening, but you can reduce how often it works. The single biggest lever is speed between final interview and offer. Every extra week a candidate sits with an unsigned offer is a week their current employer has to notice they're job hunting and start working on them. The second lever is making sure the offer conversation covers more than salary, the reasons people actually leave roles (no growth, a platform that's stagnant, a manager they've stopped trusting) are exactly the things a counter-offer usually can't fix, and reminding the candidate of that, gently, is fair and useful, not manipulative.
The third lever is one most hiring managers skip: ask directly, before the offer stage, whether the candidate expects to be counter-offered and how they'd think about it. People usually have a clear-eyed answer, and the ones who've thought it through in advance are far less likely to wobble when the moment actually comes.
Where a search partner earns their fee here
This is one of the few moments in a search where having someone outside your own company genuinely helps. A candidate will often be more honest with a search consultant about whether they're tempted by a counter-offer than they will with the hiring manager directly, simply because there's less pressure in the conversation. Catching that hesitation early, while there's still time to address it, is worth more than almost anything else we do in the final two weeks of a search.