Six Figure Salary Negotiation

Industry Insiders Get You the Money You Deserve

Michael Zwell

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781440515002
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

More than 7 million Americans make six-figure salaries--and you can be one of them! Corporate recruiter Michael Zwell uses his twenty-five years of experience to show you how to reach that goal. And he brings you insider advice about salary negotiation from top business leaders, including: Robert Wright of the Wright Institute; Donald P. Delves of the Delves Group; Catherine Candland of Advantage Human Resourcing; Stan Smith of Smith Economics Group; Tom Terry of CCA Strategies; Judith Wright of the Wright Institute; Mylle Magnum of IBTWilliam J. White of Bell & Howell. These industry insiders show you how to negotiate a satisfying job offer or raise. They tell you how to ask the right questions and how to close a job offer at the right moment for the best salary and benefits. With these experts at your side, you'll get the salary and benefits you deserve.

CHAPTER ONE

Finding Your Next Right Job

Dave Jensen had worked in the technology field for his entire career, most recently as a middle manager—that is, until he was downsized as part of massive layoffs at his former employer. After that, Dave engaged in the usual activities of the newly unemployed: networking, sending out resumes, and interviewing. He pursued every job possibility, at least through the first interview. With a month left in his severance package, Dave’s job prospects were down to three opportunities.

1. An IT manager in a large, stable company, working in its corporate headquarters. The job prospect was attractive, and Dave especially liked the security of working in the corporate office. One major drawback for him, though, was that he had been told throughout a lengthy interview process—first by a recruiter and then by the hiring manager—that the top salary for the position was $105,000. In his last job, he was making $135,000, plus bonus.

2. Working for a large consulting firm where he would be given a base salary of $125,000 and a chance to earn potentially more from bonuses and other incentives. A major consideration for Dave was the work/life issue. He was the father of two young sons, and this job would require him to travel all the time. The hiring manager, in fact, told him upfront that he should expect to be on the road from Monday through Friday virtually every week.

3. As a consultant attached to a smaller consulting firm where he would not be an employee but a contractor. There would be some travel involved, although not nearly as much as with the large consulting firm. He would have the potential to make close to $135,000 a year, but as a contractor he would be responsible for paying for his own health insurance, making quarterly tax payments, and funding his retirement plan.

Dave was in quandary about which position would be his next right job, the one he should take. He really liked the idea of maintaining his $135,000 salary level, which made the position with the large consulting firm very attractive, but the more he thought about it, the less he wanted to be on the road every week. Being a consultant/contractor was appealing, but after paying his own benefits and Social Security contribution (as required for self-employed people), he could end up with far less in his pocket. The most attractive job on balance was the IT manager position, which seemed to be the most secure and offered a logical career path. The salary, however, remained a sticking point.

The interview and recruiting process were very involved as Dave pursued the IT manager position. The more he interviewed, the more he liked the job, although he had not reconciled himself with the fact that he would be making $105,000 a year. When he received a surprise call from a senior manager at the company—the hiring manager’s boss—Dave was pleased when the executive asked, “How much salary are you looking for?” Dave quickly replied that he wanted to make $150,000. The senior manager took in the information and continued the conversation.

Shortly aferward, the hiring manager called Dave back and questioned the figure he had given her boss. Dave backpedaled and tried to smooth things over by saying he was still very interested in the position. The hiring manager asked if he would accept the offer if it were made to him. Dave replied he would need to see the offer first, but was “very interested.” The recruiter later called him to let him know an offer at $105,000 was coming and wanted to know if he was going to accept it. Dave said that he had some questions—including about the benefits package and the job title—but he was certainly leaning that way.

A few days later, the hiring manager made him an offer to become an IT manager at the firm with an annual starting salary of $105,000, plus vacation, health insurance, retirement, and other benefits. Dave reviewed and accepted the offer and started his new job the following Monday—with two weeks left on his severance package.

To review Dave’s salary negotiation process, let’s look at what did and did not happen.

The Negotiation: What Happened

• Dave was approached by a recruiter who told him from the first conversation what the maximum salary was. Dave replied that the compensation was acceptable, while harboring doubts that he did not express.

• When the hiring manager’s boss called him, Dave took that as an opening to ask for more money, which nearly sabotaged the opportunity for him. To salvage the situation, Dave had to give assurances to the recruiter and the hiring manager that he would, indeed, accept the offer with the salary that was first discussed. In all of these conversations, Dave never attempted to understand the company’s needs so that he could present himself as a candidate for a job that had more responsibility and would require his leadership skills and managerial talents.

• At no time did Dave try to negotiate other elements of this compensation package, such as more vacation, educational benefits, and so forth.

What Could Have Happened

• Dave could have done a much more thorough job of learning about the responsibilities, problems, and projects for the IT department, what the critical problems and issues were, and what the leadership needs were to help the department succeed at servicing the organization. Based on this knowledge, he could have presented a broader range of capabilities that he could employ to help the organization achieve its objectives. That could have resulted in him obtaining a higher-level job or being targeted for that job in a near-term promotion.

• Dave could have explored in depth the full benefits available to employees, understood or probed what benefits were negotiable, and negotiated at least for more vacation time and for educational benefits. This would have been worth thousands of dollars to him annually.

• He could have investigated the culture of the organization much more thoroughly, discovering how work gets accomplished, how decisions are made, how teams cooperate (if at all), and so forth. Had he understood how much value he could create, he would have seen that his style fit well with the organization and would have been able to sell himself better.

Perception, Reality, Lies, and Emotion

On the surface, the story of Dave’s new job seems pretty straightforward. However, like the saga of any job search and salary negotiation, it is anything but simple. Finding your next right job requires discernment, self-assessment and awareness, emotional intelligence, and the knowledge of how much you don’t know throughout this process. Job searches and salary negotiations are rife with emotion, rooted in the reality that how much money a person makes has a direct impact on his feelings of self-worth and self-esteem.

When it comes to negotiating salary, title, responsibility, and other aspects of the job, most people have very little experience. Yet they are up against people who negotiate compensation every day of the week. Even if the hiring manager doesn’t, the human resources department does. These people know what they’re doing, and most other people don’t.

If that weren’t enough, the whole recruitment and negotiation process is based upon managing perceptions, projecting the “right” image, and being less than fully truthful. In today’s hiring process, both sides try to exaggerate their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.

On one side there is the job seeker, who wants to put the best foot forward, which often means presenting an image and portraying experience and expertise that he believes the prospective employer wants to see. On the other side is the hiring manager, who wants to paint the rosiest picture of the job and the work environment to make it as attractive as possible. In the middle may be a recruiter, whose number one concern is successfully placing a candidate in a job in order to make money and attract repeat business from an employer.

As each says what he thinks the other wants to hear, I can’t help but draw the comparison to dating. Courtship and job recruitment are both emotionally charged processes that are geared around attraction. In courtship, you look your best and say the right things. You want to make a good impression to please the other person and hide any flaws that could cause someone to reject you. In the job search and salary negotiation process, people do the same thing, exaggerating their strengths and hiding their weaknesses. If they oversell themselves, they may end up in jobs at which they fail because they did not have the skills and experience to succeed.

You wouldn’t think of getting married after a couple of dates. Two people don’t have enough information about each other to make such a momentous decision. Yet they make career moves after a few interviews that, while not as long-term as marriage is supposed to be, can turn out to be either tremendously rewarding opportunities to learn and grow as a person—or potentially disastrous. In fact, the odds seem weighted more toward the side of disappointment in job searches because the process does not allow and encourage either party to disclose the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Lynne was aggressively recruited to become a senior-level executive as part of the executive team of a national company. She was happily ensconced in her job as an executive of a regional operation for another large company when a headhunter contacted her. She was attracted by the picture that he presented to her of being part of the leadership team. She was especially interested in the opportunity to develop employee-training programs and to be the liaison to the company’s philanthropic foundation. Through three rounds of interviews with board members, Lynne thought she asked discerning questions about her responsibilities and the goals of the corporation. Based on what she was told, she accepted the position.

Once she was on the job, however, she discovered that the responsibilities of her position were entirely different from what she had been told. After a few months she asked why she had not been told the truth about her job responsibilities and the problems that the company was having—including in-fighting on the executive team. The board member replied, “If you knew the truth about the job, we didn’t think you would have taken it.”

They were right; Lynne wouldn’t have. Now, having been in the job for less than a year, she has prepared her resume and is already in the market for a position that more closely matches her career needs and wants.

I’d like to say that Lynne’s experience is an unfortunate anomaly. Sadly, it happens more often than people think. Job titles that have been promised don’t materialize. Responsibilities change, or other tasks—including ones that might have been delegated in the past to support staff—bog the job down. The picture of the harmonious work environment turns out to have been grossly distorted. Even the pay that was promised—as in you’ll be making “X” in six months—is never delivered.

Why does this happen? The job recruitment and negotiation process is booby-trapped with misleading or limited information on both sides, plus perceptions and fantasies that cloud judgment and distort reality. Although the company says it’s in a robust and growing environment with new opportunities on the horizon, it could be going through all sorts of inner turmoil or corporate restructuring, facing economic realities from narrowing profit margins to new competitors in key markets. The job seeker may have a gap, blip, or some other kind of incongruity in his employment history, or she may be taking a big step down in salary because she was overpaid in her last position. It all needs to be managed, massaged, and explained.

To top it all off, there are the job seeker’s own emotional swings from the scarcity mindset (“My severance package/savings account/ patience . . . is running out, and I better take any job”) to false euphoria (“I’m better than anyone else in this field, and I’m not taking a dime less than my salary objective, no matter how grossly inflated and out of line with current market conditions it is.”)

My goal in this book is to help people become better job seekers and salary negotiators by becoming more successful at uncovering and avoiding those traps that can lead them down the wrong career path to an unsuitable job, cause them to pass over better opportunities, or sabotage their own success. The objective is to help you become more informed and empowered throughout what can be a stressful and emotionally difficult process. The key is to know how to ask the right questions, to listen with more discernment to the answers given, and to rein in your emotions to make more logical, objective decisions.

Anyone who thinks that job recruitment and salary negotiation is just about money, or is a game in which one side tries to win at the expense of the other, is sorely mistaken. It is about creating a winning solution, which includes a compensation package with base salary, bonus, and other incentives. The process is comprehensive and holistic, and it starts with a job seeker.

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Traps, Lessons, & Tips

IT’S ALL ABOUT YOUR CONTRIBUTION

THE TRAP: You think that maximizing your income is the ultimate win.

THE LESSON: I saw a cartoon many years ago in which an interviewer is sitting across the table from the candida...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION: The Match Game
• CHAPTER ONE: Finding Your Next Right Job
• CHAPTER TWO: What Is Your Value? with Stan Smith
• CHAPTER THREE: Corporate Culture and You, with Catherine Candland
• CHAPTER FOUR: What’s Your Market? with Donald Delves
• CHAPTER FIVE: Negotiating Salary with Your Current Employer
• CHAPTER SIX: Your Benefits Package, with Tom Terry
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Valuing the Feminine Style: Negotiation for Women, with Judith Wright
• CHAPTER EIGHT: The Winning Combination: Performance and Relationship, with Mylle Mangum
• CHAPTER NINE: The Employer’s Perspective, with William White
• CHAPTER TEN: Being a Buyer, Not a Seller, with Bob Wright
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: Negotiating Your Offer
• Resources