how do you negotiate your wage on a new job?
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I asked for a certain value with around 10% more than what I expect to get. They said they're writing a proposal for me to think about during the weekend. Assuming it's good enough for me is it usual to just take it or people expect some more bargaining?
I'm curious about how business owners like @Polygeekery and @apapadimoulis do these things.
Surely I'll do whatever is the wrong thing no matter the advice, cause that's how bad I suck at these things, being impulsive as hell.
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@sockpuppet7 said in how do you negotiate your wage on a new job?:
I'm curious about how business owners like @Polygeekery and @apapadimoulis do these things.
Currently I structure as much compensation as possible to be based on productivity and profitability. Your raise is effective when you are.
But in the past when I've hired salaried or hourly wage employees I generally made one offer that I thought was just and fair compensation for the job as discussed. I would not say that there was zero wiggle room in those offers, but there wasn't a lot. A few percent would not have necessarily been a deal breaker, but it also wasn't a given.
I tend to not play games on things like this. If a job is worth a certain amount I'm not going to try to undercut that by 20%. That's how you end up hiring idiots that cost you more money than you
saved .I would rather pay more money and hire people that don't require me to micromanage. I'm an employer, not a babysitter.
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@sockpuppet7 said in how do you negotiate your wage on a new job?:
I asked for a certain value with around 10% more than what I expect to get. They said they're writing a proposal for me to think about during the weekend. Assuming it's good enough for me is it usual to just take it or people expect some more bargaining?
I agree with @Polygeekery here. If the counter-proposal's acceptable, you walk, and if it's not, you balk and that's the end of it either way. You can always do more negotiations after your first year on the job, citing your performance and your initial
demandrequest.
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When I got my current job, they proposed a number, I said "that sounds a bit low based on $factors, can we go up $a few percent. The HR person said they were pre-authorized up to <number>, roughly 8-9% above the offer. We ended up just settling on that number. No second-round negotiations--offer, counter, re-offer, accepted.
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Like @Polygeekery, I don't "play games" on salary. It's too important.
I see salary as something that serves two purposes for employees: enable financial comfort/stability, and operate as a performance/responsibility lever. In theory you can lower salary, but in reality, the lever only works when raised.
If you want a higher salary from the start, then the performance expectations and responsibilities will increase. I need to be assured that I won't have to fire you for not meeting the higher bar, and that means you had better be assured you can pull it off, too.
If you want a raise, then apply for (or propose) a promotion. The same "I don't want to have to fire you" rule applies, which is why promotions go through a probationary/evaluation period.
The only "game" (some people say) is that I'm very straight-forward about this in the hiring process; tell me your salary requirements and expectations, and we will line up between those, or I won't make an offer.
We make it clear from the start that this isn't a "high-paying job", relatively speaking. If you want an engineering job where you make the most amount of money and have to put in the fewest number of hours, study COBOL and MUMPS. If you want the equivalent marketing job, get your security clearance and work in the defense department at Boeing or Lockheed.
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@heterodox said in how do you negotiate your wage on a new job?:
You can always do more negotiations after your first year on the job, citing your performance and your initial demandrequest.
I would encourage having a promotion mentality. Basically, "I want a promotion because I've demonstrated I can meet the increased expectations, as I'm performing above expectations in my current role."
When it comes to expectations, you should try to get feel which side of the performance bar you're comfortable on: either an over-achiever most of the time, or an under-achiever some of the time.
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@apapadimoulis said in how do you negotiate your wage on a new job?:
If you want a raise, then apply for (or propose) a promotion. The same "I don't want to have to fire you" rule applies, which is why promotions go through a probationary/evaluation period.
Not to be
, but doesn't that basically encourage Peter Principling yourself? IE, if the only way to get more money is by promoting, then people will be encouraged to promote beyond what they're capable of?
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@sloosecannon said in how do you negotiate your wage on a new job?:
Not to be
, but doesn't that basically encourage Peter Principling yourself? IE, if the only way to get more money is by promoting, then people will be encouraged to promote beyond what they're capable of?Eh... the Peter Principle is pretty dumb, and really missed the point. But this isn't quite that.
Promotions don't necessarily mean management, or even from junior to mid-level. It could be as little as taking more responsibility for a given task/assignment; for example, instead of just writing a blog article and having your boss accept it, it's writing it and directly posting it without your boss.
People who are growth-focused are constantly doing things they haven't done before, and many of those things are beyond their capabilities. They fail at some things, but growth-focused people tend to usually learn form those failures and quickly improve. But not always, which is why promotions should be provisional (trial period).
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@sloosecannon said in how do you negotiate your wage on a new job?:
doesn't that basically encourage Peter Principling yourself? IE, if the only way to get more money is by promoting, then people will be encouraged to promote beyond what they're capable of?
The Peter Principle only applies if promotions take you into a new role, rather than a higher level of the current one. Historically there has been a lot of that - technical people being 'promoted' to management, which is a completely different role with different skills.
If your organisation has 'senior engineer' type roles then you can be promoted in a technical track and it doesn't really apply so much.
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@bobjanova said in how do you negotiate your wage on a new job?:
If your organisation has 'senior engineer' type roles then you can be promoted in a technical track and it doesn't really apply so much.
It can still apply somewhat, though. You can be promoted into a role that requires skills or knowledge you don't have. For example, you can be in a role that requires intimate knowledge of a particular subsystem and be promoted into a role that requires less detailed but still in-depth knowledge of the entire system. If your coworkers who have the knowledge of the other subsystems are too busy doing their own jobs to transfer knowledge to you, you are not going to succeed. Even if they do give you the necessary knowledge, you may find it's just too much information to keep track of at the same time. BTDT.
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@HardwareGeek Yeah, that's why I said 'not so much'. Even in technically oriented companies there is a tendency for promotions to mean a wider scope or more of a team lead (i.e. management) or customer liaison (i.e. BA/requirements analysis) role which requires different skills.
But it's not as bad as it used to be.
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@bobjanova said in how do you negotiate your wage on a new job?:
The Peter Principle only applies if promotions take you into a new role, rather than a higher level of the current one.
The point is simple and based on two basic observations:
- If you succeed in your current role, you are more likely to get promoted.
- Promotions change the nature of the role that you're in.
The combination of these two is sufficient: people tend to rise until they can't master the role that they're in. Which is the Peter Principle.
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@dkf I remember there was some study claiming that random promotions worked better in a simulation
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@sockpuppet7 said in how do you negotiate your wage on a new job?:
@dkf I remember there was some study claiming that random promotions worked better in a simulation
That sounds more like the Dilbert Principle in action.
I wrote The Dilbert Principle around the concept that in many cases the least competent, least smart people are promoted, simply because they’re the ones you don't want doing actual work. You want them ordering the doughnuts and yelling at people for not doing their assignments—you know, the easy work. Your heart surgeons and your computer programmers—your smart people—aren't in management. That principle was literally happening everywhere.
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@bobjanova said in how do you negotiate your wage on a new job?:
The Peter Principle only applies if promotions take you into a new role, rather than a higher level of the current one. Historically there has been a lot of that - technical people being 'promoted' to management, which is a completely different role with different skills.
If your organisation has 'senior engineer' type roles then you can be promoted in a technical track and it doesn't really apply so much.That's one thing I like about my current company-- there's a technical track all the way up to (and including) the Vice President level. I've seen the Peter Principle bite my clients hard (which sometimes bites us too to some extent, because we have to be able to work with their leadership) but have never really seen it in action in my own workplace.
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@heterodox the thing I don't like about technical tracks is that if you leave one job, that is much less transferable to another place than what the managers have
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@sockpuppet7 Managers often like to think that they have skills that can be transferred to any organisation. After all, who needs to know anything about what the grunts are doing to manage them, yes? Of course, it turns out that knowing something about what bits actually matter to the business is important in reality, but that's not what the modern MBA is built around…
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@sockpuppet7 said in how do you negotiate your wage on a new job?:
I asked for a certain value with around 10% more than what I expect to get. They said they're writing a proposal for me to think about during the weekend.
You made the first mistake already.
If an interviewer asks me what my salary requirements are, my response is to give a small laugh and say "oh come on, you know there's only one right answer to that question: what are you offering?" If the company is trying to fill a role, you'd better believe they know exactly what it's worth to them. By asking what salary you're looking for without disclosing this information, they're trying to get you to lowball yourself so they won't have to.
My tactic has always been to stand firm on this. Don't give any numbers until they have already laid theirs on the table. If it's reasonable, or if it's higher than you expected, just say "OK, sounds good to me." If it's a bit too low, then you can express disappointment and say "I was kinda looking for something a bit closer to X." If it's way too low, tell them that's nowhere near the going rate and they'll never fill the position like that and make it clear you're about to walk out. But failing to make them give the first number is probably the single biggest mistake you can make in a job interview.
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@Mason_Wheeler "we plan to offer between $60K and $120K, depending on the candidate's experience and qualifications, which we'll learn through the interview process. We ask for salary requirements early on to help set expectations. If a candidate said their requirements were $120K, the bar would be set as high as it can go, and they'd need to score near perfect and then deliver; if it was $60K, then the bar would be much lower, and there'd be a lot more growth and learning opportunities on the job. So that said, what are your salary requirements and expectations? "
** YOUR MOVE **
Dilbert principle - Wikipedia
