Blog Post One
4 Strategies to Negotiate a Higher Starting Salary
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to help one of my coaching clients negotiate her starting salary for a new role. I was excited to see her walk away with something a lot more favorable than the original offer. Looking back on the discussion, here were the 4 main things I encouraged her to do. 1. Know that Companies Expect You to (AND Benefit if you) Negotiate First, almost* all companies expect you to negotiate. If you do not negotiate, you are typically leaving money on the table. You are not selfish to negotiate. Negotiating is not pushy. Negotiation is part of the game. The company is making you an offer because they want you to work there. Typically, the structure is set-up to offer you the lowest amount of money that they think you might accept. I wish it didn’t work this way. Hopefully, they shared a salary range upfront. Even if you did not have a conversation upfront, it is your job to tell them what you need to accept the job happily and to feel valued. Here is additional important context about hiring from someone who served as a recruiter for many years. Hiring the right person can be extremely challenging. I’ve gone through many searches where we have hundreds of applicants and come out the other side not wanting to hire any of them. Especially for mid- or higher-level roles, it’s a myth that quality candidates are everywhere. They aren’t. Let’s also talk about the costs of recruitment. According to the Society for Human Resources Management, the administrative and recruitment costs are around $4,000 per employee. I think this is a very low estimate. This might be possible if you are hiring hundreds of people for the same entry-level job. If not, there are a lot of costs associated with hiring. These include: Creating the job description Designing interview processes Posting the roles on good job boards (that actually cost money) The time associated with scheduling interviews and communicating with candidates The time for everyone who needs to interview each candidate The time to debrief the interviews and make a decision. They certainly aren’t including all these costs when coming up with $4,000 to recruit a new employee. There’s another study that includes the costs of onboarding and says that a company could spend 38% of the first year’s salary to hire and onboard a new person. Based on my experience, this seems a lot more accurate, especially for higher-level roles. And, if they don’t hire the right person, that cost could be doubled. This context is important for one reason. If the company is making you an offer, they want to hire YOU to work there. And, if they don’t hire you, they could end up spending almost 40% of your first year’s salary to hire someone else. There’s also likely not someone just as good as you waiting in the wings. Given this context, the company should want to hear from you if $5,000-10,000 (or even $15,000) in salary would make a difference in your decision. When I worked in HR, I certainly wanted to know this. Usually, we could go up. Sometimes, a company doesn’t have all the information about your qualifications or what you need to do the job. Think about it this way. You are giving the company the choice of increasing your starting salary or needing to go back to the drawing board and rehire. When faced with this choice, the better trade-off is usually to give the candidate more money. Let me repeat that… The better trade-off is usually to give the candidate more money.