Salary Negotiation
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Salary Negotiation
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Re: Salary Negotiation
#2[deleted]
Re: Salary Negotiation
#3Hi everyone! That's me you hear talking to Patrick ;) If you have any questions about the episode or salary negotiation in general, ask away! As you can probably tell, I love talking about this stuff!
Re: Salary Negotiation
#4The original blog post is one of the best reads on the topic. Especially for people who never tried to negotiate before or always failed.
Re: Salary Negotiation
#5We're really trying to nail a good way to deal with salary negotiations when onboarding people, at GrantTree - one that gets out of this "gotcha" approach to salary.
So far the best we've figured out is to be the first ones to name a number, and be super-transparent about how we arrived at that number.
The reasoning is that "in a salary negotiation the first person to quote a number loses", so since we (as the employer) are in a naturally stronger position, we deliberately "lose" upfront to avoid forcing the other person into a negotiation dynamic where they're going to try and push it as high as they can, and we end up trying to push it as low as we can. I think everyone loses out from this, and it starts the working relationship with distrust.
Instead, we run a pay evaluation process internally, including feedback about the value of the role and the person from all the people who interviewed the candidate. We publish all that feedback, as well as the suggestion/reasoning of our pay trustees (a group of people who use that feedback to try to place the candidate on our pay scale), along with the number this maps to, and the full pay scale, and the list of how much everyone is being paid in the company so they know where they stand (anonymised, because not everyone is comfortable yet with someone who is not yet a team member knowing their salary).
So far we've successfully used this process once and it led to a great onboarding experience. It's a recent development. I hope it continues to work, and allows us to avoid the games described in this very helpful podcast. I thought I'd share it in case other employers here are struggling with the same question.
This won't work in every company. Have a read through http://danieltenner.com/open-cultures/ if you want to understand more about how we run the company - hugely important in making this work.
Re: Salary Negotiation
#6Hi everyone! That's me you hear talking to Patrick ;) If you have any questions about the episode or salary negotiation in general, ask away! As you can probably tell, I love talking about this stuff!
Hey Josh! Hope you don't mind me tossing the link to your workshop on youtube here. It was super helpful!
Re: Salary Negotiation
#7Hi everyone! That's me you hear talking to Patrick ;) If you have any questions about the episode or salary negotiation in general, ask away! As you can probably tell, I love talking about this stuff!
Hey Josh! Hope you don't mind me tossing the link to your workshop on youtube here. It was super helpful! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN19aNmjBoU
I don't mind one bit. Thanks for posting this!
Re: Salary Negotiation
#8We're really trying to nail a good way to deal with salary negotiations when onboarding people, at GrantTree - one that gets out of this "gotcha" approach to salary. So far the best we've figured out is to be the first ones to name a number, and be super-transparent about how we arrived at that number. The reasoning is that "in a salary negotiation the first person to quote a number loses", so since we (as the employ…
Instead, we run a pay evaluation process internally, including feedback about the value of the role and the person from all the people who interviewed the candidate. We publish all that feedback, as well as the suggestion/reasoning of our pay trustees (a group of people who use that feedback to try to place the candidate on our pay scale)
None of those factors are why someone is worth $X salary.
You say I'm worth $X. I go get a job offer for $Y. If $Y > $X, you were mistaken.
It's both as easy and as hard as that, for candidates. If you want to get anywhere close to your earning potential, you'll have to have more than one option when job seeking.
It doesn't matter what you're paying other employees or whether that information is known to employees.
EDIT: To clarify, this is about market value, not intrinsic value.
Re: Salary Negotiation
#9One thing Patrick seems to be wholly ignorant of is that engineers, by default, maintain a very high correlation with nonassertiveness and dearth of social skills. Those stereotypes exist for a reason. For most of us, these factors are baked into our essence from childhood, and are virtually impossible to break. In the absence of concrete interaction examples or a corpus of negotiation scripts to analyze, none of his vague advice is useful for many of us.
Re: Salary Negotiation
#10We're really trying to nail a good way to deal with salary negotiations when onboarding people, at GrantTree - one that gets out of this "gotcha" approach to salary. So far the best we've figured out is to be the first ones to name a number, and be super-transparent about how we arrived at that number. The reasoning is that "in a salary negotiation the first person to quote a number loses", so since we (as the employ…
Instead, we run a pay evaluation process internally, including feedback about the value of the role and the person from all the people who interviewed the candidate. We publish all that feedback, as well as the suggestion/reasoning of our pay trustees (a group of people who use that feedback to try to place the candidate on our pay scale) None of those factors are why someone is worth $X salary. You say I'm worth $X.…
No one is worth any intrinsic amount. The amount is relative to the work they do, the industry they're in, the state of the economy, how many other people can do that job, how many have actually applied, etc.
Any salary formula is entirely arbitrary. We have a pay scale simply because it is a useful tool for conversation, not because it represents any sort of intrinsic property of the person being placed on the pay scale.
If your main concern is getting paid as much as possible then we're probably not the right place for you to work anyway. We try to pay well but we certainly can't afford to pay as much as, for example, banking, or Facebook. Importantly, we have no interest in trying to sucker someone into working with us if money is their primary motivation. They won't like it here.
To answer a likely reflex-response to this: that doesn't mean we think people should be working for free, or that we judge people who want to earn more money. It's totally fine to want to make more money. Different people have different expectations and requirements at different stages of their life though.