While there are many nuances to a successful compensation negotiation, keeping these five principles in mind will increase the odds of your making tens of thousands of dollars in minutes.
Postpone the negotiation until after you get the offer. Once they make you the offer, all the negotiating leverage has switched over to you. After the offer is made, the hiring manager wants you to start “yesterday”– they are focused on you, they aren’t thinking about the other candidates. So things that weren’t negotiable before are suddenly negotiable. Before the offer, citing a salary requirement that wasn’t in line with their thinking could have immediately excluded you from consideration, no matter how well you were doing otherwise (in an interview they are looking for ways to screen you out).
Always place yourself on the same side of the table of your employer when negotiating. Do not be an adversary– re-iterate how much you’re looking forward to contributing.
Focus on negotiating the job, not the compensation. That is, make your case for compensation by showing that you will be helping them with more than the job posting. Or, by saying that you need to be brought in at a higher level to get the respect and attention you need to do your job effectively.
Take into account all aspects of compensation when you negotiate. It’s not just base salary, it’s bonus, profit sharing/equity, 401k matching, amount of raises, frequency of raises, tuition reimbursement, job title, and on and on. In short, everything is negotiable, and you should consider the big picture when negotiating. This means you need to have all the information about compensation before you negotiate. Having a big list of items to negotiate means you’re more likely to get something.
Research is your best friend in a negotiation. If you can make the negotiation about the market rate that competitors are paying, and not about what you want, your case will be much stronger.
There’s so much more to say on this subject, including how to manage the negotiating session and how to address salary questions in an interview, so you may be hearing more from me on this topic.
Five Elements of a Successful Salary Negotiation
by Robert Hellmann • Interviewing, On-the-job Success
While there are many nuances to a successful compensation negotiation, keeping these five principles in mind will increase the odds of your making tens of thousands of dollars in minutes.
There’s so much more to say on this subject, including how to manage the negotiating session and how to address salary questions in an interview, so you may be hearing more from me on this topic.