🔟 10 Wise Ways: Negotiating a Job Offer

How to get what you deserve.

Photo by Renate Vanaga on Unsplash

There’s a taboo around negotiating, and it’s time it got broken. After a long and arduous gauntlet of cover letters, interviews, and take-home tests, many who receive a job offer just aren’t comfortable asking for something more.

Today I’m giving you some tools that I hope will change that. I’m going to try to do it without slinging any of the slippery bullshit that is too often slung by influencers and coaches.

I’ll also skip the standard pep talk about the importance of confidence. I’m going to avoid hawking manipulative tactics like asking for a much higher figure than you actually want. Negotiating is stressful enough, I think, there’s no need to kick it off with a lie.

Instead I’m going to give you exact words that I have used myself many times when working to secure a better deal. Speak these words yourself, and you’ll be one step closer to getting the offer you deserve.

An emotionally intelligent negotiation is a straightforward, honest conversation in which both parties are mutually seeking the best possible outcome for each other. See it this way, and you’ll be better equipped to operate on a level playing field.

Negotiation Reservations

Your model for negotiating may be informed by your experience making major purchases — a home, a car, a mattress — or from haggling in a marketplace. Many Americans get an alarming introduction to the craft when negotiating usurious medical debt.

If you’re fortunate enough to lay your hands on a job offer, it’s time to put all of that behind you.

Your negotiating partner in most career or business situations is usually someone with whom you’re considering a lasting relationship. That’s a much different situation then when you’re negotiating with a stranger you may not see again.

Are you reluctant to ask for more, for fear that you’ll be perceived as greedy, or because it just doesn’t feel right? You’re not alone. I wish that nobody felt that way, but there are good reasons why many people do.

This will be easier for some, and harder for others. It helps to keep in mind two things:

1. Any reasonable employer expects a candidate to respond to an offer with a request to negotiate.

2. What’s the worst that can happen? Any reasonable request is very unlikely to garner a response that’s any worse than “Sorry, no.”

I hope these next ten tips will get you into shape to take the first step towards improving your next offer.

Ready? Here we go!

1️⃣ How to Always Negotiate

People who negotiate get a better deal than those who don’t, and those who don’t are often women. In the book Women Don’t Ask, we learn the unfortunate fact that women are far less likely to negotiate a job offer than men. This contributes to the pay gap that can cost each woman $500k+ over the course of their career.

Systemic, institutionalized, and unconscious biases give women and other marginalized people plenty of reasons to be reluctant to negotiate. No matter your gender or background, people who overcome their reluctance to negotiate are very likely to be rewarded with better outcomes.

I encounter resistance from coaching clients who’ve heard of someone who tried to negotiate an offer, then the employer got offended, and the whole deal was spiked. Ugh!

There are three things to know about this:

1. Maybe this happened, but it’s very rare. Anecdotes are memorable because they’re infrequent and unlikely. When somebody asks for a better offer and gets it, which they do every day, they don’t run to their computer and tell the world about it.

2. You can use easy and safe methods to ask for an offer to be improved, and run very little risk of giving offence. Is it possible to make a mistake that causes hurt feelings? Sure, it’s possible. With some experience and forethought, this is a vanishingly unlikely scenario.

3. If an employer makes an offer, then yanks it because you asked for it to be improved, fuck them! Seriously, no sane person punishes someone for trying to negotiate. Megalomaniacal people probably do it all the time! If anything like this happens, you’ve probably dodged a bullet.

2️⃣ How to Start Slow

If this is your initiation to negotiation, you might feel apprehensive. Perhaps you’ve had a bad experience in the past, or no experience at all. Maybe you think of yourself as the kind of person who is not pushy or demanding, and wants to stay that way. We love this about you. Please don’t ever change!

Whatever your reservation, you can take a small and simple step towards bargaining for something better. Here’s one way to do that:

“Thank you! I’m really excited about this offer. Is it possible for the offer to be improved in any way?“

That’s polite, modest, and straightforward. No reasonable person could fault you for asking this. If they say “No, sorry, it’s a ‘take it or leave it’ situation” — well, ok! Negotiation is over, and it’s successful in the sense that you know you haven’t left anything on the table.

A much more likely response is something like

“Improved? Maybe. What did you have in mind?”

You can say something like:

“Could the salary be adjusted? That would make it much easier for me to accept.”

or

“Under what circumstances might you be able to offer a signing bonus?”

You don’t need a reason, permission, a license, or a permit to ask simple, reasonable questions like these. Make no apology, just approach the conversation with humility and grace.

If that seems like too much to stomach, here’s something even easier:

Thank you for this offer. I’m really excited about the opportunity. A question: which aspects of this are open to negotiation? If it’s appropriate, I could propose a couple of adjustments.

If you feel like you need permission, go ahead and ask for it! I’m a ruthless negotiator, been doing it for a hundred years, and I still ask for permission almost every time.

Everything is negotiable, as the saying goes, so this is an overly-courteous formality. It’s like asking if you can use the restroom — nobody has ever said no, but it’s still nice to ask. An extra humble courtesy shows you’re a thoughtful and relatable human being.

By all means, ber more decisive. Just ask for the offer to be improved, like in the first example. Or take the latter baby step if you’re feeling unprepared to be that direct before you’ve had a bit more practice.

3️⃣ How to be Realistic

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A negotiation complication arises from “sticker shock.” That’s when you offer a figure that makes the other person think you’re insane, from a different planet, or using recently-legalized recreational drugs. You should avoid this at all costs (the sticker shock, I mean.)

If you respond to a job offer with counter-proposal that the employer thinks is not in the right ballpark, or even playing the right sport — you might find the offer incinerates on the spot, like a Mission Impossible briefing. A hiring manager might disinvite a candidate whose negotiating approach reveals a self-assessment that seems mismatched with their own.

Avoid sticker shock by asking for a modest increase — perhaps up to 10% or 15%. You can also try asking for more without saying exactly how much more you want.

If this offer could be increased, it would be much easier for me to accept. Could you propose a higher figure that would help me feel confident pulling the trigger?

This is not the most aggressive approach, but I think it’s reasonable and safe. I had an employer come back and say “We don’t want to negotiate against ourselves.” I replied “I understand. I don’t want to risk causing offense by proposing something unrealistic. It you could propose what you believe is reasonable and fair, I promise to give it serious consideration.”

Another safe and sane tip is to avoid negotiating over email. Get on the phone or video, and ask for immediate feedback on anything you request. Be ready to retreat from your position upon a bad reaction. Example:

“I understand that people at your company have sometimes negotiated for some additional vacation time. If this offer could be adjusted to include an extra 5 days per year, I’d be delighted. Does that sound like a realistic request?”

Again, not super aggressive and perhaps on the meek side, depending on the situation.

4️⃣ Understanding Salary Bands

Photo by Yannis Papanastasopoulos on Unsplash

The foundation of any job offer is usually a predetermined “salary band.” This determines what the company considers appropriate compensation for that role, based on their own market research and what they pay others. Whether you’re paid high in the band or low depends on any number of things. One factor is how well you negotiate.

You can always ask for the salary range associated with the position. There’s a trend towards being more open about these, which is backed by transparency laws popping up from state to state. Some companies are embracing this, others are providing ranges to wide they’re meaningless. If you’re not happy with the range you received at the beginning of the process, you can always ask:

Can you tell me the applicable compensation range for this position and give me a sense of where I might fall in it, based on what you know now?

You can be paid above the top of the band or range — those are unusual but happy circumstances, perhaps the subject of another long post. You might be paid below the band if you’re transferring internally into a role, or being hired despite not quite meeting the predefined criteria.

Despite the transparency rules, the precise low- mid- and high-points of the band are typically kept secret. The hiring manager and recruiter may or may not even know them, depending on their level and the rules within the company. As a ballpark, imagine a ±15% spread on either side of a midpoint - like $85k to $115k for example, for a position with a 100k midpoint.

Based on this rule of thumb, negotiating an increase of more than 10% from what’s been offered means, mathematically, you very well might run into the top of the band. That’s not necessarily terrible — it’s not an electric fence. It calls for a bit of caution, though. You can easily get into sticker shock territory and give the employer the impression they can’t afford you.

Here are two ways to try to maximize the offer while respecting the salary band, staying on the safe side of things:

I’m sure there’s a defined compensation range for this position. I think my qualifications ought to me at or near the top of it. Does this offer reflect that, or could it be adjusted to move me up in the band?

The salary in the offer isn’t quite what I’m hoping for. You mentioned that it’s close to the top of the band, what other ways might the offer be adjusted to affect the total compensation?

If they say that you’re already close to the top of the band (which, amusingly, they almost always seem to do) — respond by asking if it’s possible for them to make any adjustment at all.

In the second example, you’re inviting the employer to discuss variable compensation (bonus or commission), stock or option awards, perks, or other forms of communication that might move the needle.

5️⃣ Ask the Right Questions

Here’s a helpful affirmation to guide you through any bargaining opportunity:

I am curious, I’m inquisitive, I am wise.

Emotionally intelligent people know that curiosity is an essential tool for developing empathy and self-awareness. By asking questions in any business setting, you’re demonstrates your interest in other people, admitting that you don’t know everything, and that you’re interested to learn.

Through research and practice, I’m convinced that questions are the cornerstone of a successful negotiation. If you take only one “negotiating tactic” into your next opportunity, make it this one. It’s an especially handy tool for people who strictly want to avoid feeling too bold or aggressive.

Here’s how it works best:

“Open ended” questions are ways of being curious or inquisitive that invite an informative answer, rather than a single-word response. Think of the difference between asking a kid “How was school today?” and “What was your favorite part?”

In the context of a job offer, open-ended questions might start with “what”, “how”, “which”, or “why.” Closed questions invite a binary response, and might begin with “Could/Would you”, or “If.”

Any question that invites the sharing of more context, information, or requirements can be helpful in a negotiation. Here’s some specific examples:

What are some of the ways that an offer like this might typically be improved?

Another example:

Which aspects of this offer do you feel are set in stone, and what might be open to negotiation?

One more:

Which elements of the offer do other candidates typically look to improve?

Resist the temptation to supply the recruiter or manager with default or assumed answers. You’re in this conversation to find the outcome that’s best for both of you. Let them fill in the blanks for you rather than asking for yes/no answers. This is a great way to ensure the discussion is moving in a way that they feel is productive.

6️⃣ How to be Resilient

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A job offer is justification for immediate celebration. It can also cause a bit of stress as you work out how to respond. It’s probably the most important thing happening in your life at that moment. The recruiter, on the other hand, is probably handling many transactions on the very same day.

High-stakes decisions are flying back and forth via email, which we all know is the worst way to do get almost anything done. It adds up to fertile ground for misunderstanding of tone and emotion, sometimes straining relationships and leading good deals to go bad.

For as long as you think there’s a chance you want to end up working for the company, maintain a relentlessly upbeat and optimistic attitude to every conversation you have with them. Move those conversations to voice or video rather than email whenever you can.

At the end of a long and grueling interview process, you may get an offer that is so bad that it makes you want to go back to bed and pull the covers over your head. Try to keep your disappointment to yourself, and assume you’re one or two steps away from being offered exactly what you’ve always wanted.

Here’s an example response to a terrible offer:

“Thank you so much for this offer! I really appreciate the positive feedback and vote of confidence. I’m excited at the prospect of joining your team. Some of the details aren’t exactly what I expected, but I’m sure we can work them out. I’d love to talk with you about this. When can we talk?

Unless you’re conjuring some kind of mystical negotiation magic, never react negatively or with disappointment or frustration, even to an insultingly bad offer. It simply won’t help you achieve your goal.

Companies toss lowball offers at great candidates for all kinds of stupid reasons. Make the effort, and you might turn a bad offer into a good one. I’ve personally been involved in negotiations that saw offers swing upwards by 20% to 40% or more. I just heard from a colleague (an amazing, inspiring woman) who negotiated and got six figures of cash and stock added to her initial offer. 🙌 to that lady!

Candidates talk themselves out of getting a better offer if they react poorly to the first one. Don’t take the lazy route by letting a slow reply be the signal your ambivalence. A lukewarm response to an offer is a good way to make sure there won’t be a second.

Why? Employers sometimes react emotionally to a candidate’s reaction to them. This is, frankly, terrible. I say this having been guilty of it myself. Hiring managers sometimes feel like they’ve put a lot of work into getting the candidate an offer. We can forget that the imbalance of power between potential employer and prospective employee means that the burden of courtesy is on us.

Try to stay upbeat. Don’t think of it as a bad offer, just think of it as the first. Always believe a better one is possible. If you can, try to forgive the employer’s errors or discourtesies — as long as they fall short of abuse, neglect, or bogosity.

Believe in your own ability to make the best out of any situation.

7️⃣ How to Sell Yourself

Without qualification, maintain your “job interviewer” persona throughout the process until it is signed or dead. Express your passion, be excited about the opportunity, and express ravenous curiosity to learn more, starting on your very first day on the job.

It’s great if he employer believes they’re doing an amazing job of recruiting you. The stress of dealing with a negotiation often causes candidates to inadvertently give the impression that they’ve lost their enthusiasm for the role. Give the sense that you’re right on the verge of saying “Yes.”

When communicating by email, don’t cut corners on being polite. If you’re feeling gratitude and appreciation for your negotiation partner, try something like:

I really appreciate you working through these compensation issues with me. Thank you for working through these things with me.

Are we blowing sunshine up their butt? Maybe. There’s a time for everything, and perhaps the time for that is now. Here’s why.

A candidate’s conduct during the negotiation has often caused me and other managers to start having second thoughts about their pick. For me, a candidate’s choice to negotiate has never been problematic. More than once, though, their style or approach to the discussion revealed something that I didn’t see in the interview process.

If we get a slow reply to an offer, we might speculate the person was pursuing another opportunity, and we’re their second choice. A candidate who pushed too hard, making unreasonable or unorthodox requests, might make us question whether we’d enjoy working with them under pressure.

A long laundry list of assorted requests, like a eccentric rocker’s green M&M’s tour rider, might make us wonder if they lack self-awareness or humility. It’s fine to make a bunch of requests, if that’s what it will take to get the deal done. As the list grows longer, be mindful of how they’ll appear when shared among the team.

This role is a great fit for me, and I’m really excited to get started. I’m super optimistic but could use a day or two to think things over. Could we plan to talk on Thursday at 2pm?

Do not fear rejection of any reasonable request. You won’t get everything you ask for, but you’ll never know if you don’t try.

And don’t test out what “reasonable” means by sending it to the employer! If you’re not sure how a request might be perceived, find someone to ask (you can always ask me!) Failing that, you should go out of your way to pose it as a polite and humble question.

8️⃣ How to Make a Connection

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In every conversation, strive to make a personal connection with the people you encounter. Send a “Human Being, Here!” signal to everyone you meet as you interview, negotiate, and explore each opportunity.

I have really enjoyed this interview process. Tell me a little bit about how this has gone for you.

People want to do business with people who they like. Cognitive bias causes us to be more trusting and welcoming of people we perceive as similar to us. This is the root of harmful prejudice, but can also be made to work to your advantage when you connect with someone on a human level.

Recruiters are often not treated as well as they should be. Plenty of candidates feel they’ve been treated poorly by recruiters in the past. Recruiters I’ve talked to blame this increasingly sweatshop-like conditions, with ever-growing expectations of productivity from managers who scarcely understand the work.

Foster the best, most empathetic, home-team relationship with the recruiter or hiring manager from the very word ‘go.’ Find a few moments in every conversation to ask them a question about themselves. Tell them something extra about yourself that they didn’t strictly need to know, if it helps them understand something about who you really are.

Developing a rapport with a prospective employer can give you an unfair advantage over other candidates. The interpersonal aspect of recruiting is so influential that large companies train recruiters and hiring managers not to engage in “unnecessary” conversation with candidates. Some of us may have sometimes broken that intolerable rule. With luck (and maybe a little charm) perhaps you can overcome that. If you do, you' might earn yourself an unfair advantage over the competition.

Here are some conversation starters:

I’d love to know a little more about you and your work. How you wound up at the company?

Here’s another:

I’m really excited about this role. Do you have any suggestions for me on how to improve my chances?

There are three great reasons to ask a recruiter for advice. First, they know as much as anybody about what works and what doesn’t for someone in your shoes. Second, the recruiter is likely motivated to help get you hired. They’re usually measured by successful placements, not the number of candidates interviewed.

Finally, there’s the Ben Franklin effect. It’s an old maxim which lately has gained convincing support from cognitive science. People are more likely to want to help someone they’ve already done a favor for.

9️⃣ How to Break the Money Taboo

With few exceptions, the cultural taboo against talking about money seems to exist in almost every culture. That’s unfortunate, because it works against our interests as employees. Employers once discouraged or forbade workers from discussing compensation with each other. That’s a pretty good sign that it’s beneficial to our interests! (This practice is now illegal in the US.)

Talking about one’s earnings still causes discomfort for many people. You gain nothing from observing or maintaining this taboo, other than conformance. Breaking it benefits you, because an informed negotiator is a better one. Talk to your peers about money. Start conversations about other aspects of what’s worked and what hasn’t in their own career development.

Here’s one way to start that conversation with someone you trust:

Hey there. I’m working on a job search and I’m trying to figure out where I stand on compensation. Could I share some of my experiences with you, and maybe you could tell me some of yours? No need to divulge anything you’re not comfortable with.

Frank compensation conversations are a normal part of almost every professional coaching relationship. A professional coach has an advantage over mentors chosen from colleagues at work, or from your network or community. It just feels more comfortable to talk about these things with an otherwise uninvolved third party, and to someone who you’re paying. That’s why it’s often easier to talk to a therapist about things you don’t even tell your bestie.

My clients have used compensation calibration conversations with me to negotiate job offers, promotions, and to change the way they market themselves. This translates to money in the bank for them, and there’s almost nothing I enjoy more than that.

🔟 How to Use Data

Prompt: A person is researching salaries on the internet using an expensive laptop computer. The laptop screen shows a salary survey report. The person using the laptop seems concerned by what they're seeing on the screen.

Through investigation and evaluation, you can learn what people are paid for comparable roles in your industry. Having this data on hand fortifies your own requests and can stiffen your negotiating resolve. Collaborate with your professional and personal network on this, and check out a few salary survey sites (here’s my favorite.) These accumulate job titles and pay ranges via reports from anonymous contributors.

I’ve cross-checked survey site pay bands against what I’ve seen in my own work. They can be both frighteningly accurate and factually incorrect. It’s a bit like the estimates of home value on Zillow. You can use them to get a useful impression of what’s going on, but don’t run out a buy anything based on what you see there.

Never rely on any individual report from a salary survey site. Don’t quote an individual figure you see there to your prospective employer. It’s frustrating to have somebody throw a poorly-sourced internet figure at you when you know the actual facts but probably can’t say them out loud.

You can definitely disregard the top ~20% of compensation figures reported for any given role. People who got a unicorn deal for an unusual reason rush right to these sites to crow about them. I think quite a few more find creative ways to round up their own numbers, because you know, internet. Selection bias is at work here also, as people who got a lowball offer are probably less likely to report it.

Combine all of the information you find to make an educated guess about what the salary range for your role is. This anecdata will give you an impression of what is reasonable and customary for the role you’re considering.

This doesn’t make sense mathematically, because the bands should be responsive to the offers that actually get made and accepted. That doesn’t seem to happen, though, because almost every first offer I’ve been able to check turns out to be in the third quartile (50% - 75%) of the band.

One explanation is the Lake Wobegon effect — nobody makes an offer to a candidate who they think is below average. It’s also politically expensive to say your candidate is strong than everybody who came before them, so you should expect to have to negotiate your way into the top of the band.

When you get an offer that you think is not near the top of the band, you can say something like:

“I got the impression from [site] that the range for this position could go up to [figure] — what can I do to get myself into the high end of that range?”

Wrapping it Up

Photo by Lucian Alexe on Unsplash

Thanks for staying with me as I wrote the word “negotiation” about seven hundred times.

I hope this negotiation education is facilitation for your compensation communication. Use it with any corporation in a hiring situation. Like a Hatian on vacation in a woody wagon station. Sorry, this is turning into mental…uh, self-indulgence?

One more piece of advice for anybody who’s feeling nervous about a negotiation: don’t do it alone. Pick up the phone, call someone (anyone!) with a little more experience than you, and ask them:

Hey there! I’m working on getting a new job and I’m nervous about making sure I don’t sell myself short. Could you help me think through my negotiating approach?

Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. If you don’t get every penny you deserve out of the job offer, there’s another chance coming in your annual review.

More on that in another post. Let me know what you needed but didn’t get from this post, or about your own experiences negotiating.