Worker's Company Denies Her $10k Raise Then Hires A Replacement For $15k More Than Her Salary After She Quits
Congratulations, company, you cost yourself tens of thousands of dollars more than the raise.
Yan Krukau | Pexels | Canva Pro It's certainly no secret how stingy companies have become, and asking for a raise these days can often feel like asking for a kidney. But a worker's story on Reddit is a perfect example of how this greed often ends up shooting the company in its own foot, costing them gobs of money, all because they wanted to try to nickel and dime a good employee.
A worker was denied a $10k raise and then replaced with a new hire for $15k more.
This is hall-of-fame-level incompetence. In their Reddit post, the worker writes that they are highly skilled at their office job and consistently knock it out of the park all day, every day. And unlike most jobs, their employer actually realized what they had. When they went through their latest performance review, they gave them a perfect score of 100%.
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So, if they're that good, a pay raise is in order, right? How many times have we been told by our employers that a 100% evaluation score is basically impossible? So they went in and asked to be paid what they are worth: $10,000 more.
Their employer countered with $3,000, which they say didn't even cover the cost of inflation in recent years and, if current trends continue, would probably amount to a salary deduction within the next year or so. So, they stuck to their guns and quit. What the company did next could not have been dumber.
The replacement hire was not only $15k more expensive, but also less qualified.
After doing some research, the worker determined that it wasn't worth it for them to stay at their current job because jobs paying what it was paying are a dime a dozen anyway. So even if they couldn't find a position for $10k more, the worst case scenario was that they could still end up back where they started.
Their employer, on the other hand, was very clearly in a bind. Workers who get 100% evaluation scores don't come around every day. Sure enough, the worker heard from a former colleague that the company had hired their replacement, but had to shell out $15,000 more in salary to nab him.
Worse still, the new replacement is inexperienced and very behind where he should be. This left the Redditor asking the obvious: "What's the point in letting me leave and hiring someone less experienced at a higher salary?"
This incompetence likely actually cost the company tens of thousands of dollars.
"I could understand if they hired someone very experienced or at a lower salary than mine, but this situation makes no sense," the Redditor went on to say. But that is actually a wild understatement, because replacing an employee costs companies far more than just the employee's salary.
Recruiters' salaries, software and hiring platform subscriptions, and advertising alone cost gobs of money, but then there's the lost productivity as the job sits unfilled. That costs money, too. Then, once you hire someone, you have to get them onboarded (more time and money), and train them (more time and money), all while losing overall productivity because you're now paying a salary to someone who doesn't yet know what they're doing.
Roll it all together, and HR experts say that recruiting and filling a new position costs roughly 50% of the new hire's YEARLY salary. But some experts say that's a wild underestimate. By the time you factor in ALL of the staff, systems, and projects impacted by the hiring process, the real cost of recruitment ends up being three to four times the yearly salary. Three to four times!
So in the final analysis, this company will eventually have paid not only $5,000 more in salary than they would have if they'd just given their star employee the $10k they asked for, but tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars in recruitment, onboarding, training and lost productivity costs, all because they wanted to be cheap.
That is, in a word, stupid, and in any other job besides HR and management, that kind of money hemorrhaging idiocy would immediately get you fired. "Your employer was bluffing and you called the bluff," one Redditor asked. "They will have to pay more money and you win by not having to work for them." That's pretty much the long and short of it, and we should all remember this story the next time our employers try to gaslight us.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
