Vernon Jayanathan. Image Credit: Maritime Recruitment Company Limited

As a head-hunter I have, more than once, put heart and soul into finding a position for a candidate only for them to back out at the last minute after the supposedly toxic employer made a counter-offer.

Each time I was flabbergasted, and one still grates: I got that person everything they had asked for in salary, bonus and holiday, and they stayed when the boss they had complained about offered the same.

For an employer, a successful counter-offer in bunker trading looks like a save: a trader resigns, the house matches the new package, and the book stays put.

The trouble is that in this market it is usually a delay, not a long-term solution.

The asset saved is not the individual but a set of owner relationships, supplier lines, and a reputation for getting stems done, and once that person has priced those relationships at another desk, matching last year's base does not put them back where they were.

Money Is Merely the Trigger

The decision to leave is almost never just about salary.

Money is the trigger, but the fuse is months of irritation be it from opaque discretionary bonuses, credit too tight to trade the book they already have, no route to promotion, or watching a less capable peer treated better for all the wrong reasons.

If the raise only appears after notice is given, the trader needs to read it correctly, because it is a raise made under duress. Everyone knows that anything offered under duress is not supported by grace and good will.

Accepting it does not restore trust; it confirms that the house knew the market rate, could have paid it earlier, and waited until it had no choice.

It breeds resentment too, not only in the owners who felt cornered into the offer but in the colleagues who find out. It is a fact that they all find out eventually.

Unlike a generic office job, a trader's value is a book built on personal relationships, and that book travels.

Clients tend to follow the person who solved their problem in the middle of the night and stood behind the stem when quality or payment went wrong.

The incoming firm is not buying a CV; it is buying the probability that the book transfers, and it has usually offered a clearer split, often a published percentage of P&L rather than an annual pot, precisely because that is what moves books.

A counter that only raises the base leaves the original complaint intact: the trader still cannot see how their P&L becomes cash in their pocket, and in a year when house margins swing from razor-thin to embarrassingly fat, that opacity is the grievance.

Everyone Finds Out

Everyone else hears about the match.

The quiet one who did not resign now has a market quote for what it takes to get paid, so the next resignation is cheaper to start and more expensive to stop.

Across professions, most people who accept a counter-offer are gone within a year or eighteen months anyway, and bunker desks add an extra twist: other firms keep calling, and the clients already know a move was in play.

The trader who stayed is now a flight risk in every credit committee and every promotion conversation, and the limit increases and stretch books go to the people the proprietors believe will still be there.

Operationally, the match often cannot deliver what the new offer promised.

The trader may have wanted a bigger credit line, faster supplier payments, or simply the freedom to deal with alternative suppliers without a soul-destroying approval chain, and those are balance-sheet and culture choices.

Writing a larger base cheque does not create working capital or change who signs off risk.

Six months later the same stem is stuck in the same process, only now the trader has burned the exit and must start again from a weaker position from which to negotiate.

The Counter That Works

The rare counter-offer that works is not a salary hike even if it is above and beyond what was offered, but a rewritten contract: a published pay-out formula, a real limit, and a reason to stay that existed before the resignation letter.

Houses that only discover the value of their people at the door have already told the market how they value them.

Traders notice, and so do the other employers waiting to sweep in.

I am here if you need me.