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I'm interested in what your negotiation principles are. I've always heard that a candidate should never share salary information and require the company to pro

by p4wnc6 11y ago

I'm interested in what your negotiation principles are. I've always heard that a candidate should never share salary information and require the company to provide the first concrete number in the form of their initial offer. However, I've repeatedly used all of the "business-professional" and "HR approved" sorts of conversational techniques to enact this advice, and the only result that has ever occurred is either (a) the company literally refuses to even conduct a single interview with me before knowing salary information, or (b) the company finally makes a job offer and it is extremely low, something around 50%, of what I have earned previously in similar roles. 95% of the time I say I am more focused on assessing cultural and technical fit for the position, making sure I would jell with the team, finding out more about the company, learning more about the trade-offs required for the role, etc., as reasons for not providing salary information as literally the first point of communication with HR, it results in an instantaneous rejection. I still believe candidates should not agree to unfair information asymmetry by revealing their salary or wage preferences first. The problem is it just seems that something like 95% of all hiring managers will outright immediately reject you, on principle, if you don't agree to bear that unfair information asymmetry. All the great techie blog posts on being a better negotiator, like this:< http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ > -- they sound great and give me a pumped up rah rah feeling, but in practice they basically never work. My interviewing experience with this has covered large multi-national companies, tech firms, small boutique quantitative finance firms, start-ups, consulting companies, and education technology. There certainly are industries I am missing, but it has seemed like a universal phenomenon to me.

JoshDoody 11y ago
One of my negotiation principles is "Don't disclose your current or desired salary" during the negotiation. With persistence, the recruiter or hiring manager will usually just move on. Another principle is that you should always counter. So I'm _extremely_ surprised to hear that 95% of the time, people have refused to continue talking with you. I can't refute your experience, but I can say this has never happened to me or anyone that I've worked with to negotiate a starting salary. Patrick's writing, which you alluded to, was a big inspiration for me to write and think more deeply about this subject. He knows what he's talking about. If you watch the Salary Negotiation workshop (linked in my original comment), you'll see a section on "The Dreaded Salary Question" and there was a 15-minute discussion on it in the Q&A. (Both are linked in the notes below the embedded video.) You might watch those segments to see if anything jumps out at you that yo haven't' tried before. Thanks for the question!
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  In the handful of cases where the company was OK with my non-answer about salary, and I went on to get all the way to a job offer, the salary ended up being entirely miscalibrated to a candidate of my skill and experience, and the overall interview process (which usually included some technical screens, programming tests, take-home tests, and long on-site technical interviews) was a massive waste of my time, not to mention extremely stressful. Places where I experienced this gross miscalibration: a large U.S. food retailer's digital analytics team; a small pharmaceutical research software company; a 25-year-old multinational scientific computing and supercomputing consulting firm; and an FFRDC research lab attached to a university. In one of these places they even went on at length about how much the hiring manager liked me, how I fit all the skills they were seeking, and many team members remarked that I would "mesh instantly" with the team, and so forth. I had walked away from those interviews knowing that I had done a good job and feeling very confident. Then they made a job offer than was around 75% of what I had been making before in a similar job in a similar cost of living area, and the new job's other benefits were far worse. When I told them what I was making before, they just said, "it just looks like there's a bit of a gap here that we are unable to make up, but we think you'll be very happy on this team so we hope you'll consider our offer despite that." The people interviewing me in that company had even gone on at length about how successful their business unit had been recently, signing a new important contract, and how their biggest challenge was recruiting good people and staffing up to support some projects that had important deadlines looming towards the end of 2016. I still continue to avoid sharing salary info, because I'm not convinced that sharing it would be better. But I think what you might not be accounting for is that almost every single candidate in the tech world does share salary, freely and openly, from the very first minute they are asked, without even realizing it might have any side effects. A lot of corporate recruiters are conditioned to expect this, and the minute someone fails to share salary, they flag them as "not a dope, can't hire them cheaply" and they just move on. Constraint number one, above any and all talent requirements, is that they must be cheap to hire ... for a lot of firms.
  - lexhaynes 11y ago
    How do you respond when they ask you for your salary information? Would it be perceuved as rude to say "I decline to state"?
bcg1 11y ago
> I've always heard that a candidate should never share salary information and require the company to provide the first concrete number in the form of their initial offer Its true that it is irrelevant what you made at your last job, but its kind of silly to play coy when they want you to give a number. When you're trying to get hired you are selling yourself... and the first step in selling is to qualify the customer. Just tell them a number that you would actually be acceptable to you, and if they balk then you don't have to waste your time. If you find out more about the job or company and decide you actually want more money, once you get an offer you can try renegotiating that number and give them your rationale.
cthalupa 11y ago
I refuse to move forward even with a phone interview if I don't have a salary range from a recruiter. It's just not worth my time.
- dave2000 11y ago
  How do you know? They might be paying more than the jobs you go for.
  - cthalupa 11y ago
    Because I've found that the companies that are offering the type of compensation I'm looking for are willing to discuss it. They know what the type of talent they're looking to attract makes, and that they aren't going to be interested in wasting their time. Might there be some out there that would be willing to pay me what I'm looking for, but unwilling to discuss it up front? Possibly. But after wasting several dozen hours of my life with offers that weren't even in the same ballpark of what I was making or what I was after, I made the decision to not bother if the recruiter wouldn't be candid up front.
stale2002 11y ago
There IS another solution to this. When someone asks how much you are currently making, you should flat out lie. They won't check. I've job hopped a bunch, and usually I just take whatever I was currently making, and add 15%, and say that that was my base. If employers are going to play negotiation games, you shouldn't feel bad about playing them too.
- elbigbad 11y ago
  I have been asked for proof of current salary (paycheck stubs, etc.) to be included with all my onboarding and HR forms when the current salary formed a basis for my new salary, FYI.
  - spinlock 11y ago
    That is none of their business and you should not feel bad about saying no.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - elbigbad 11y ago
      I agree in theory. In practice it came after I had an offer, an impending start date, and had put in notice to my current job. It was an onboarding day where I was filling out tax and HR forms. Hard to suddenly say no out of principle knowing it might make them revoke the offer. I was truthful about current salary so there wasn't anything to hide.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    Nonsense like that is why you should never let your current salary form a basis for negotiating your new salary.
- wheaties 11y ago
  You do this and they catch you, you will be fired. I am a manager who believes in pay people more. Pay them what they want, not what they were making. That said, if you lie to me, I don't take it well.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
peteforde 11y ago
This is really interesting and I'm glad that you shared. I don't know if you'll like what I'm about to say, but you sound like a pragmatist so I figure that you will appreciate a no-BS answer. It's likely that there's something about your manner, presentation, personality - which I can't and won't fathom to guess because I don't know you - that is tipping your hand and sending the message that you're bluffing or easily manipulated. Obviously nothing is going to work every time but the stuff Patrick and others relate is solid advice so it is of concern that you're repeatedly getting iced out. The other possibility is that you're interviewing with terrible people; however, the common aspect is still you and the only way to grow is to analyze whether there's a problem. Could you just not be very convincing? Do you have an irritating voice? Do people generally snicker when you make confident assertions? I don't know why it happens in any case, just that in some unlucky cases it does happen. My advice is that you have to be thoroughly believable in your disappointment in their offer. You have to look unfazed when you refuse to tell them what you made in your last job. Finally, if none of these things is true and you're basically George Clooney, then I urge you to interview at different companies.
ipsin 11y ago
I've heard the same advice, and frankly I think it depends on how strong you feel your position is as well, and so I think it's really important to have a realistic model of your prospects. If you feel your job prospects are generally weak, you might not be comfortable standing firm on things like keeping salary history hidden. That seems reasonable to me, as long as you're not selling yourself short. "Impostor syndrome" is a thing. I would actually reveal salary history if it's a "favorable" history -- if I would be happy taking a similar amount, because I value something about this new job more than my previous employment.
hvindin 11y ago
It's odd, I have no doubt that you have had these issues, I was talking to a guy who worked for the same company as me, with the same client, just the other day. His entire team where just told they were being made redundant and the company who would be doing the work would be interviewing them all. The new company told everyone to send them either their current pay slip (with all benefits etc) OR their current pay rate (its just a different document with less detail) + the salary they would accept in the new company. So I know that this sort of thing happens and no one was that shocked. But I've never encountered the issue, I would be interested to see an analysis of what sort of jobs people who deal with dodgy HR reps are applying for (or what route to entry they are taken) vs the jobs people with positive experiences of the hiring process are going for. I feel like it can't only be luck, presumably there would be some trends (ie. people who respond to advertisements are offered X% against people who are recommended through word of mouth for the same job)
netman21 11y ago
I have had many jobs. Here is how I start a salary negotiation: I name the package that will get me to drop everything and start tomorrow. Salary, bonus, benefits, options. Anything less and we can talk, but I will still be negotiating with other companies, and one of those may snap me up, or I will continue doing what I am doing today. That puts them in the position of convincing me that the intangibles (career growth, challenge, great team, mission) justify taking less. At the end of the day, you are happy with what you get, regardless of what someone else gets.
ohyes 11y ago
You have to play the game a little. Add up your salary, other compensation (options), a markup for how big a pita changing jobs is, cost of living in the new area of applicable. Then throw that away and mark up to the number that you actually want. Pick something that you think is silly high. Don't say "my current salary is 90,000" say "I would like to make 170,000". You didn't tell them your salary/total comp, but you answered the question and you anchored to a higher value.

by p4wnc6 11y ago

JoshDoody 11y ago

One of my negotiation principles is "Don't disclose your current or desired salary" during the negotiation. With persistence, the recruiter or hiring manager will usually just move on. Another principle is that you should always counter. So I'm _extremely_ surprised to hear that 95% of the time, people have refused to continue talking with you. I can't refute your experience, but I can say this has never happened to me or anyone that I've worked with to negotiate a starting salary. Patrick's writing, which you alluded to, was a big inspiration for me to write and think more deeply about this subject. He knows what he's talking about. If you watch the Salary Negotiation workshop (linked in my original comment), you'll see a section on "The Dreaded Salary Question" and there was a 15-minute discussion on it in the Q&A. (Both are linked in the notes below the embedded video.) You might watch those segments to see if anything jumps out at you that yo haven't' tried before. Thanks for the question!

p4wnc6 11y ago
In the handful of cases where the company was OK with my non-answer about salary, and I went on to get all the way to a job offer, the salary ended up being entirely miscalibrated to a candidate of my skill and experience, and the overall interview process (which usually included some technical screens, programming tests, take-home tests, and long on-site technical interviews) was a massive waste of my time, not to mention extremely stressful. Places where I experienced this gross miscalibration: a large U.S. food retailer's digital analytics team; a small pharmaceutical research software company; a 25-year-old multinational scientific computing and supercomputing consulting firm; and an FFRDC research lab attached to a university. In one of these places they even went on at length about how much the hiring manager liked me, how I fit all the skills they were seeking, and many team members remarked that I would "mesh instantly" with the team, and so forth. I had walked away from those interviews knowing that I had done a good job and feeling very confident. Then they made a job offer than was around 75% of what I had been making before in a similar job in a similar cost of living area, and the new job's other benefits were far worse. When I told them what I was making before, they just said, "it just looks like there's a bit of a gap here that we are unable to make up, but we think you'll be very happy on this team so we hope you'll consider our offer despite that." The people interviewing me in that company had even gone on at length about how successful their business unit had been recently, signing a new important contract, and how their biggest challenge was recruiting good people and staffing up to support some projects that had important deadlines looming towards the end of 2016. I still continue to avoid sharing salary info, because I'm not convinced that sharing it would be better. But I think what you might not be accounting for is that almost every single candidate in the tech world does share salary, freely and openly, from the very first minute they are asked, without even realizing it might have any side effects. A lot of corporate recruiters are conditioned to expect this, and the minute someone fails to share salary, they flag them as "not a dope, can't hire them cheaply" and they just move on. Constraint number one, above any and all talent requirements, is that they must be cheap to hire ... for a lot of firms.
- lexhaynes 11y ago
  How do you respond when they ask you for your salary information? Would it be perceuved as rude to say "I decline to state"?

bcg1 11y ago

> I've always heard that a candidate should never share salary information and require the company to provide the first concrete number in the form of their initial offer Its true that it is irrelevant what you made at your last job, but its kind of silly to play coy when they want you to give a number. When you're trying to get hired you are selling yourself... and the first step in selling is to qualify the customer. Just tell them a number that you would actually be acceptable to you, and if they balk then you don't have to waste your time. If you find out more about the job or company and decide you actually want more money, once you get an offer you can try renegotiating that number and give them your rationale.

cthalupa 11y ago

I refuse to move forward even with a phone interview if I don't have a salary range from a recruiter. It's just not worth my time.

dave2000 11y ago
How do you know? They might be paying more than the jobs you go for.
- cthalupa 11y ago
  Because I've found that the companies that are offering the type of compensation I'm looking for are willing to discuss it. They know what the type of talent they're looking to attract makes, and that they aren't going to be interested in wasting their time. Might there be some out there that would be willing to pay me what I'm looking for, but unwilling to discuss it up front? Possibly. But after wasting several dozen hours of my life with offers that weren't even in the same ballpark of what I was making or what I was after, I made the decision to not bother if the recruiter wouldn't be candid up front.

stale2002 11y ago

There IS another solution to this. When someone asks how much you are currently making, you should flat out lie. They won't check. I've job hopped a bunch, and usually I just take whatever I was currently making, and add 15%, and say that that was my base. If employers are going to play negotiation games, you shouldn't feel bad about playing them too.

elbigbad 11y ago
I have been asked for proof of current salary (paycheck stubs, etc.) to be included with all my onboarding and HR forms when the current salary formed a basis for my new salary, FYI.
- spinlock 11y ago
  That is none of their business and you should not feel bad about saying no.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - elbigbad 11y ago
    I agree in theory. In practice it came after I had an offer, an impending start date, and had put in notice to my current job. It was an onboarding day where I was filling out tax and HR forms. Hard to suddenly say no out of principle knowing it might make them revoke the offer. I was truthful about current salary so there wasn't anything to hide.
- vidarh 11y ago
  Nonsense like that is why you should never let your current salary form a basis for negotiating your new salary.
wheaties 11y ago
You do this and they catch you, you will be fired. I am a manager who believes in pay people more. Pay them what they want, not what they were making. That said, if you lie to me, I don't take it well.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

peteforde 11y ago

This is really interesting and I'm glad that you shared. I don't know if you'll like what I'm about to say, but you sound like a pragmatist so I figure that you will appreciate a no-BS answer. It's likely that there's something about your manner, presentation, personality - which I can't and won't fathom to guess because I don't know you - that is tipping your hand and sending the message that you're bluffing or easily manipulated. Obviously nothing is going to work every time but the stuff Patrick and others relate is solid advice so it is of concern that you're repeatedly getting iced out. The other possibility is that you're interviewing with terrible people; however, the common aspect is still you and the only way to grow is to analyze whether there's a problem. Could you just not be very convincing? Do you have an irritating voice? Do people generally snicker when you make confident assertions? I don't know why it happens in any case, just that in some unlucky cases it does happen. My advice is that you have to be thoroughly believable in your disappointment in their offer. You have to look unfazed when you refuse to tell them what you made in your last job. Finally, if none of these things is true and you're basically George Clooney, then I urge you to interview at different companies.

ipsin 11y ago

I've heard the same advice, and frankly I think it depends on how strong you feel your position is as well, and so I think it's really important to have a realistic model of your prospects. If you feel your job prospects are generally weak, you might not be comfortable standing firm on things like keeping salary history hidden. That seems reasonable to me, as long as you're not selling yourself short. "Impostor syndrome" is a thing. I would actually reveal salary history if it's a "favorable" history -- if I would be happy taking a similar amount, because I value something about this new job more than my previous employment.

hvindin 11y ago

It's odd, I have no doubt that you have had these issues, I was talking to a guy who worked for the same company as me, with the same client, just the other day. His entire team where just told they were being made redundant and the company who would be doing the work would be interviewing them all. The new company told everyone to send them either their current pay slip (with all benefits etc) OR their current pay rate (its just a different document with less detail) + the salary they would accept in the new company. So I know that this sort of thing happens and no one was that shocked. But I've never encountered the issue, I would be interested to see an analysis of what sort of jobs people who deal with dodgy HR reps are applying for (or what route to entry they are taken) vs the jobs people with positive experiences of the hiring process are going for. I feel like it can't only be luck, presumably there would be some trends (ie. people who respond to advertisements are offered X% against people who are recommended through word of mouth for the same job)

netman21 11y ago

I have had many jobs. Here is how I start a salary negotiation: I name the package that will get me to drop everything and start tomorrow. Salary, bonus, benefits, options. Anything less and we can talk, but I will still be negotiating with other companies, and one of those may snap me up, or I will continue doing what I am doing today. That puts them in the position of convincing me that the intangibles (career growth, challenge, great team, mission) justify taking less. At the end of the day, you are happy with what you get, regardless of what someone else gets.

ohyes 11y ago

You have to play the game a little. Add up your salary, other compensation (options), a markup for how big a pita changing jobs is, cost of living in the new area of applicable. Then throw that away and mark up to the number that you actually want. Pick something that you think is silly high. Don't say "my current salary is 90,000" say "I would like to make 170,000". You didn't tell them your salary/total comp, but you answered the question and you anchored to a higher value.