Negotiating Your Salary

This is for candidates and especially the underrepresented people.

This be you — make it rain!

Internal recruiters are a rare breed of people who get to sit on the other side of the table in salary negotiations. We are neither the people who will be affected by a few thousand dollars more on an offer letter (read: we don’t get commission and most of us don’t make bonuses either) nor the people who set the compensation bands at our company (please don’t call us HR).

Through being a recruiter, a volunteer at an organization helping to achieve pay equity for women and underrepresented minorities (shouts to Jordan and her team at 81cents), and negotiating on behalf of several dozen successful hires, I’ve learned a few things when it comes to negotiating the salary at your next role.

1. You do not have to disclose what you currently make; you do need to say what you want to be making.
2. Do your market research before you start naming numbers (no, Mr. Anonymous VP, we will not pay you $650,000 base salary).
3. When you do start naming numbers, always use a range (“I’m looking for a base salary between $120,000–150,000,” sounds better than, “I want to be paid $130,000”).
4. Name your numbers first.
5. Be open and transparent with your recruiter about your other interviews, offers, etc. — they’re trying to advocate for you.
6. If you’ve got competing offers, it benefits you disclose exact numbers to your recruiter especially if your offers are higher than your first ask or from high quality companies.*
7. There’s also a magical phrase that I learned early in my career that I’ve advised several candidates and friends to use when negotiating a salary for their dream job. If you want it, get in touch and I’ll share this secret phrase with you!

There are a number of negotiation books and course that you could check out that may help you in your negotiations. Whatever you end up learning, know that negotiation is a skill just like any other and that it takes practice to get better at it. If you want extra help on your offer negotiation, reach out! I’ve helped friends in 3 months get a collective $300,000 more on their offers using a bit of digging and a magical phrase.

81cents denotes the comparison between what men and women get paid — for every $1 a man makes, a woman will receive $0.81 cents.

*There is one exception I have seen in recent years to this rule and it was a woman engineer who was interviewing with multiple top tech companies (I’ll leave them unnamed but you know the ones). She performed well on her interviews and she told each company to name their number. ICYMI, most companies are focused on hiring more diverse candidates and women engineers are in high demand.

So, what happened?

She ended up getting some of the highest offer numbers for her years of experience from these top companies that I’ve ever seen. I don’t think this will ubiquitously work for all women engineers but it did work for her. When the market is trending in your direction and you’re the biggest catch, you can really name your price.