How To Negotiate A Job Offer

You can negotiate a job offer, and I hope you do. The negotiation doesn’t start when you get the job offer, though – it starts much earlier, when you first bring up the salary topic during the interview process.

You’ve got to have a salary target in mind when you start a job search. That means you’ve got to know what you’re worth on the talent market, not in a general way but specifically based on your background and your geography.

Use Payscale, Salary and Glassdoor to gauge your going rate on the talent market.  All three sites are free, but you’ll have to fill in a bunch of fields with personal data to get the personalized salary G2 you need.

In a job search, you’ve got to price yourself like a house. Imagine going to look at a house for sale — you like the house, but there’s no asking price. The owner is puttering in the garden when you visit, and you ask her, “What do you want for the house?”

She says “Make me an offer.” You’re going to make a lowball offer, of course – who wouldn’t?

The homeowner hasn’t given you any guidance, so naturally you’re going to shoot low and only up the offer as you go.

A job search works the same way. If you don’t tell your next boss what you think your talents are worth, s/he’s going to offer you something on the low end of the organization’s scale. That isn’t tacky or evil. If you have a salary target in mind, and I fervently hope you do, put it out there early in the process.

So far, so good, Liz, but when do I share that salary target?

Get through the first face-to-face interview (assuming it doesn’t require long-distance travel) before you broach the salary topic. There’s no sense in bringing up dollars and cents if you aren’t interested in the job or if the hiring manager and/or HR screening folks aren’t interested in you.

When somebody calls or writes to invite you for a second interview, that’s the moment to share your target range.  Why should you go back for a second interview if the company isn’t able or willing to pay you what you need?

Here’s how to bring up the salary question on the phone:

PEGGY, a COMPANY RECRUITER: So, after our meeting last week, I had a chance to visit with the hiring manager, Sam, and show him your resume. He’s excited to meet you. Will Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. work for you?

YOU: Thanks, Peggy. I’ll have to check my schedule. Before I do that, is this a good time to check on the compensation range for the position — and are you the right person to have that conversation with?

As soon as you broach the salary topic, be ready — the recruiter or HR person is almost guaranteed to ask you what you were earning at your last job. You don’t have to part with that information, and I don’t recommend that you do. Your finances are your personal business. Furthermore, your negotiating leverage goes down the tubes the instant you blurt out the details of your most recent comp package.

Is Peggy, the recruiter, going to tell you what the company paid the last guy in this position? Not bloody likely. So why should you give up your own compensation details? You don’t have to — do this, instead:

PEGGY: Yes, let’s synch up on compensation to make sure we’re in the same ballpark. What were you earning at Acme Explosives?

YOU: I’m focusing on jobs in the $75-$80K range. If that’s going to work for Sam, then it makes sense for us to keep talking.

Are you horrified at the thought of giving  the recruiter an answer different from the one she’s looking for? Don’t be. You may have swallowed a lot of toxic lemonade over the years that’s convinced you a job-seeker is a lowly creature with no clout in the hiring equation, and any recruiter or manager has the upper hand. That’s ridiculous.

How can you say that, Liz? Don’t you realize there’s a recession going on?

The strange thing to me about this worldview (“There’s a recession going on — therefore my goal as a job-seeker is to prostrate myself before every hiring authority, crawl over piles of broken glass as requested, and generally beg and grovel in order to get a job”) is its illogic.

When you need help with thorny problems, do you hire the most needy, desperate person around to help you?

Of course not. You find someone who knows who s/he is and knows his or her abilities. The bigger your problem, the more likely you are to look for a confident, self-assured professional to help you. So why do so many job-seekers mistakenly believe that the way to get a job is to grovel and fawn as though the person who’s considering hiring them is doing them a personal favor?

But there are so many people looking for jobs…

There certainly are, and most of them aren’t you, and don’t have your brains and pluck.

I was a corporate HR chief for years, and now I consult with huge corporations and tiny startups all over the world, not to mention governments, universities and not-for-profits. An economic downturn only makes any organization’s pain worse.

There are gazillions of people seeking jobs, but not all of them have the vision, get-it-done orientation and execution abilities that make a hiring manager’s heart beat faster. The more you stay in yourself and calmly, pleasantly hold your ground compensation-wise, the more credible you become.

Okay — I see what you’re saying, but I’m so de-mojofied that it’s hard to imagine myself doing that. Let’s go on, anyway.

You’re going to share your target range with the recruiter or with your hiring manager directly, before the second interview. That way, if they can’t meet your number or get close to it, you won’t waste your time going back.

If you put your number out there for your hiring manager or a company recruiter to deal with, you won’t face a potentially crushing disappointment when a lowball offer comes rolling in. If you haven’t shared your expected salary, a lowball offer is exactly what you can expect.

But I always heard that the person who names a number first, loses.

That was undoubtedly true in 1970, 1985 and maybe even 1995. These days, that logic doesn’t hold up. Employers aren’t making surprisingly generous offers to anyone outside the top-floor executive suite, and only a few of those guys get happy surprises.

For the most part, job offers today are surprising on the low side, if they’re surprising at all. Once a lowball offer is lobbed at you, you’ll have a tough time getting the hiring manager to budge more than a few thousand dollars. You’re better off communicating your target range early and letting the hiring manager deal with it then. If it’s not a fit, better to know that early, right?

I guess I thought that since I haven’t met the hiring manager yet, he doesn’t have any reason to go beyond the range he’s been thinking about. Once he meets me, he might nudge that number up. I hate to ace myself out of the pipeline before I’ve met the guy.

I understand that. Employers are used to people taking lower offers than they expected to take, so if you mention the number $75K, the recruiter isn’t going to bat an eyelash if the upper limit for the position is actually $68K. In fact, many of our clients have communicated their salary needs and gotten job offers that were significantly lower than what they’d communicated. Once they got the offer, they negotiated it.

But you talk about staying human at work. Isn’t it horribly tacky of these companies to make an offer for less than a job-seeker has already told you he needs to earn?

Honestly, I don’t think it is tacky or evil. It’s negotiation. When a homeowner says “I need six-fifty for the house” most people aren’t going to offer six-fifty right away, not unless there are other buyers dying for the house.

So let’s say you’ve communicated your seventy-five thousand dollar a year requirement, and the offer comes in at sixty-eight. You’re disappointed.

Don’t sulk and feel bad. It doesn’t mean that the hiring manager doesn’t like you or respect you. It just means it’s time to negotiate!

I hate negotiating.

So do most people. Don’t worry about it! You’re going to stay pleasant and flexible. Think about it this way: if they don’t love you now, when they’ve just decided they want you on their team, when are they ever going to love you?

So what do I say?

Here’s a script to get you started:

SAM, a VP of Distribution: So, I’ve talked to everyone I needed to talk to and I’d like to get you on our team. I’d like to make you an offer.

YOU: Fantastic! I’m excited. Can you share the details with me?

SAM: Yep. The base is sixty-eight, a little lower than the number you mentioned but a decent place to start, I think, with a bonus potential of about thirty-five hundred. Helen in HR has the details on the benefits programs, and I can answer questions, or I can try.

YOU: Okay, great. Thanks a million for that. I’m excited to jump in. I have a lot of ideas. Is now a good time to talk about the package?

SAM: Er…what about it? I hope it works for you. I don’t have a lot of flexibility.

YOU: I understand. I know budgets are tight. I’m avid to take the job. We’re a ways apart on compensation. Can we get creative and see whether we can bridge the gap?

SAM: How big a gap are we talking about?

YOU: I’m pretty set on seventy-five, and the sixty-eight offer with a thirty-five-hundred-dollar bonus gets me to seventy-one, five. That’s a thirty-five-hundred-dollar gap. Could we look at a one-time signing bonus to get me there? That would give me the income I need without disrupting your salary schedule. As for next year, I’ll worry about that next year.

SAM: I might be able to do a two-thousand-dollar signup bonus.

YOU: That’s pretty close. What do you think about some extra vacation time?

SAM: I can do one week – so that’s three-and-a-half weeks to start, instead of two and a half per year.

YOU: I’ll eat the five hundred dollars and you’ll take me to the place you raved about when we met last — the place downtown near the river.

SAM: Oh yeah, Arnaldo’s – perfect. Our CEO Jack loves that place. Well, terrific! I’ll revise the offer letter and get it over to you.

Once a firm has decided to hire you, they’ve already made an investment in the relationship. It’s worth something to them to close the deal. Don’t sell yourself short on the job market. You have talents that employers need, and if your market data is current and reasonable, you should earn the market rate. (That’s why it’s a market rate!)

Don’t drink any more toxic beverages that tell you to beg and grovel for a job. You’re a professional, and you’re worth whatever you’re asking for, if not much more. Take it from someone who’s spent many years on the other side of the desk and the negotiation, and stand for your value on the job search.

Not everyone will like your brand of jazz, and not everyone will get you. That’s okay, but remember – if they don’t get you, they don’t deserve you.