Employees are growing tired of stingy employers who won't give them a raise — so they're interviewing with other companies and negotiating for higher salaries to bring a raise to fruition.
A new trend among employees is to interview for a job and negotiate a high salary, even if they have no intention of taking the job, just to help their own raise negotiations for their current job. While employers are disgruntled by what seems like a sneaky move, it actually says more about the current job climate than it does about employees, says Aki Ito, a Senior Correspondent at Business Insider.
Receiving a raise can often feel like jumping through hoops and navigating bureaucratic red tape, even when a worker's performance is clearly exceptional. And employees are beginning to take power back into their own hands to get the raises they deserve by any means possible.
"You can't fault them," Michelle Reisdorf, a District Director at Robert Half, tells Business Insider. "Employees are finding that there's a big gap between where they are and what they can get."
Many companies are in the midst of a hiring freeze, while others are in a hiring frenzy, and often, loyalty can be penalized. Firms commonly hire employees at the general salary for a role at the time without consulting the market as it shifts and changes. And as inflation has grown dramatically over the past two years, workers' salaries just aren't keeping up, as raises are in line with existing pay scales, not the state of the economy.
The psychological effects are also profound — the longer an employee stays at a company, the worse they'll feel if they leave. Businesses exploit this to their advantage and assume that employees will see their jobs as a sunk cost; the longer they stay, the more they feel like they should stick it out.
