I have sat on both sides of this. Twenty-plus years as a QS, then years in search, and the pattern barely changes. Someone spends months getting quietly fed up, finally interviews, accepts an offer, resigns, and within forty-eight hours their employer finds money that apparently did not exist at the last review.

Here is the uncomfortable question I always ask: what actually made you look?

I have lost count of how many people tell me it was never really the salary. It was being passed over for the commercial director conversation. It was a workload that assumed they had no home to go to. It was watching decisions get made two levels up with no interest in their view, despite them carrying the numbers on the job. Money was the symptom they could name. The disease was something slower and harder to fix.

A counter-offer treats the symptom, because the symptom is the only thing an employer can fix by Friday. Nobody can restructure a reporting line, change a culture, or suddenly start valuing your judgement in the time it takes to serve notice. So they reach for the one lever that moves quickly. Cash.

And think about what that cash tells you. If they can find fifteen per cent the week you resign, they could have found it before. They chose not to, until leaving became your idea. That is not recognition. That is a repair bill, and you are the defect.

The other cost is quieter. In construction, teams run on trust, and once you have resigned, something shifts. You are now the person who looked. Fairly or not, some managers file that away. The next restructure, the next round of who gets the big scheme, your name carries an asterisk. Meanwhile the frustrations that sent you to the interview in the first place are still sitting exactly where you left them, and the pattern I see most often is the same person back in the market within a year, except now they are explaining a withdrawn acceptance to the firm they turned down. This industry is small. People remember.

None of this means never stay. If the counter comes with a genuinely changed role, a different reporting line, a mapped route to the position you actually wanted, then perhaps your resignation was the conversation that should have happened months earlier, and staying can be the right call. But that is rare, and it never fits on a payslip.

So here is the discipline I would ask of anyone thinking about moving. Before you attend a single interview, write down in one sentence why you are looking. Keep it somewhere you will see it. When the counter-offer arrives, and it will, read that sentence back and ask whether anything on the table fixes it.

If the answer is a bigger number and nothing else, you have not been given a reason to stay. You have been given a reason to wonder why it took your resignation to be valued.