You can't wait until you get a job offer to begin the job-offer negotiation process. If you stay silent about your compensation requirements during the interview process, you're sending a loud message.
That message is "You guys know better than I do what to pay me."
Before you walk into your first live interview for the job, you have to develop a Pain Hypothesis. That's an educated guess about the hiring manager's greatest pain point. If you ask yourself these questions you'll get a good sense of what that central pain point might be:
- Why did the company CFO or division Controller approve the salary budget for this job? The answer is not "because someone quit." That isn't nearly enough justification these days to hire a new person. If there weren't a crushing need for someone new on the payroll, there wouldn't be a job opening. What is that need?
- What wouldn't work well, such that it would cost this organization revenue or additional expense, if an awesome person like you were not employed in this job?
- What is the biggest opportunity that the person in this role has to make money or save money, either 'hard' revenue or expense dollars or 'soft' time/energy/focus dollars?
If you're hoping to be an Office Manager who runs the administrative staff in a law firm, you've got quite a few dollars under your control. You've got quality control at the reception desk in your purview and also the company's travel expenses, among other things. Before you go to that first interview, think about the areas under the new hire's control, and what each of those budget line items costs.
That will give you a great sense of the Business Pain your hiring manager needs to relieve or eliminate by hiring you.
A few years ago we helped a client snag a job as Director of Alumni Relations at a university that has a reputation for hiring 'insiders.' Our client figured she wouldn't get to first base in that job application process, because it's a very formal, structured process and she doesn't have any experience in either Alumni Relations or higher ed.
We sat down with her and dug into the pain lurking unspoken behind the job ad. It's always there! Sometimes you have to dig for it.
We could see that the primary purpose of the person in the newly-created Director of Alumni Relations position was to wring dollars and pennies out of the college's alums. The university had had its own Alumni Relations group for decades, of course, but one particular college never had.
Undoubtedly they hadn't needed to have a person in that role, before. During the recent (and some would say ongoing) recession other sources of funding dried up. Now it made sense for the college to invest eighty or ninety thousand dollars a year in a person who could get those alums to remember their alma mater and open their checkbooks.
In her Pain Letter, our client talked about engaging with alumni "for philosophical and financial support." Miracle of miracles, she got an interview. She had avoided the school's Black Hole recruiting portal altogether. She had written directly to the dean with her Pain Letter and Human-Voiced Resume, together in one envelope.
She got the job by using at least half of her interview time to dig into the Business Pain she (correctly) hypothesized was keeping the dean up at night. "Tell me about fund-raising," she asked him. "What have you tried? How well have those initiatives worked?"
He wanted to hear her ideas, of course, and she shared a few of them in oblique form. She knew better than to spill all the beans at the interview, and let the dean think that he could implement her ideas without her.
At the conclusion of her first interview, our client asked the dean "What is the shortfall between your current funding sources and your needs over the next five years?" I don't know any of the other candidates for her position, if there were any, but I'd be surprised if anyone else asked that highly relevant question. Go after the pain! That's your reason for being at the interview in the first place.
The revenue shortfall was big.
"If that's your number, our client said, "what percentage of that fund-raising budget feels like the proper investment in the person to perform this job?"
The dean wasn't expecting that question.
He said "There's an established salary range," and our client said "For sure. I would expect that to be the case. My question is, does the salary level you mentioned jibe with the ambitious fund-raising results you need?
"I struggle to imagine a person with a track record of highly successful fund-raising who would nonetheless take a position at that salary level."
In other words, she signalled to the dean with her question-slash-observation, pull the needle out of your arm, my darling.
Something has to give. Either you're getting a world-class fund-raising person or you're sticking with your weenie bureaucratic pay grade. She got the job at a nice bump over the budgeted amount.
If this sounds like hubris to you, don't panic. Most of us have been served a lot of toxic lemonade that tells us we mustn't ask for more money than what an employer suggests.
We must be grateful for whatever we are offered, we've been told, because there are Other People who will take the job offer if we decline it.
So what? There are always Other People who will do anything. There are seven billion on the planet. They aren't you. They don't have what you have.
Why worry about those people? Stick with the pain. Pain is expensive. People will pay for pain relief if you remind them how badly it hurts to allow things to fester at work or to make a bad hire.
You have to know your market value, and sites like Payscale and Salary will help you begin that exploration. Keep in mind that those sites report the comp levels that other employers assign to given job titles. You may be someone who transcends job titles. A lot of people are.
If the average Sales Support Representative in Concord, Massachusetts earns $58,000 per year (as Salary tells me is the case) that doesn't mean you have to earn $58,000 per year as a Sales Support Representative in Concord.
An average is a mean. It's a half-way point. If you know you kill at Sales Support and you can prove it in stories,
Somebody has to mention dollars and cents before you get to the offer stage.
If your hiring manager doesn't inquire about your salary target and doesn't mention a number to you by the end of your first interview with him or her, get that information out on the table before you come back for a second interview.
It's a new day. The old bureaucratic systems are falling apart at the seams, and I see bigger rips in the fabric every day. Don't listen to people who insist "EVERYONE starts at this salary!" outside of national retail chains. It simply isn't true. Managers have more latitude than they may lead you to believe.
Once you walk away from a few job opportunities that clearly will not grow your flame or your bank account, you're more likely to find your way to the people who can truly value (and thus use, and also deserve) what you bring.
