I am completing my honours degree in IT this year and have been for a number of interviews. I turned down Company A's offer to accept a different offer with better growth prospects and salary.
Company A is significantly smaller, and the managing director that interviewed me has e-mailed me to asked which position and salary I accepted instead. I understand that I am under no obligation to respond, but are there any benefits to revealing this information?
I would not give complete details, but if you liked them you could give them an idea of the current market.
I was strongly recruited by a company I really liked but I had two offers and in the end I turned them down. They were keen to know why, so I gave them a half-hour debrief of their recruiting process, what went well, what could be improved, and told them them the competing offer was about 25% higher. This cost me very little but will help out a good company and also their future recruits, and builds good will with people that I may meet again.
There may be benefits such as
As you stated (correctly), you are under no obligation whatsoever to furnish the employer with the information that he's requested. Doing so would be completely up to you and you'd need to weigh up whether or not it would make sense to you.
An example declination email could be:
I'm still in discussion with the other party and as such would prefer not to mention any details at this point. I do appreciate the opportunity you provided me and wish you and your business all the best.
I've experienced that there do exist companies that are completely out of date with current market salary, especially for small companies that hire various kind of specialists. I've had to turn down an offer because of this.
It can very well be that company A is aware of the fact that they might need to begin offering higher salary and they might very well simply be curious of what companies are offering someone like you so they can step up their game.
They might simply wish to counter offer, like some have pointed out. Either way I don't see any harm in telling them the difference in terms of % or simply the number that made the gap between the offers, but only if you're comfortable with it.
