How to negotiate your salary like a pro

How To Negotiate Your Salary Like A Pro

In this article, I’m going to be sharing my top two tips when it comes to negotiating your salary, whether you’re starting a new job or you’re negotiating salary, increase in the role that you’re currently in.

Tip #1: Know your desired salary going into the negotiation

So one of the most important parts of negotiating your salary is knowing your number. That is knowing what you’re worth and what salary you are aiming for. If you go into a negotiation and you don’t know what your price is, if you don’t know your value and what number you are looking to get out of the negotiation, how are you going to know if you were successful in that process? Think about it like selling your house. If you were going to put your home on the market to take bids from buyers at an auction or sell it privately, you would want to know what your house is worth to ensure that you actually get the best deal possible on your property.

Well, the same thing goes for a salary negotiation. Whether you’re starting a new job or you’re negotiating a change of position or a salary increase after a performance review, you need to know what you’re worth. You need to know what the industry benchmark is for your particular role or the role that you’re going for, and then wash against that, your own level of experience and your skills and the value that you can bring the company you work for. And that will help guide you to know what your value is and what you are worth.

Because regardless of whether you step into a negotiation and you make the first offer or the company makes the first offer, if you don’t know what you’re worth, you run the risk of being ripped off or shortchanged either way.

For example, if you go into a salary negotiation and you are making say, $55,000 a year, and then the company offers you $65,000 a year, you might say, great, that’s awesome. That’s like a $10,000 increase, but you might actually be worth to the market $70,000. So even though you’ve got more out of the negotiation than you expected to actually below industry benchmark, and you could have gotten more money out of the negotiation, so you never want to leave money on the table.

But the most important thing going in is to know your value and know what you’re worth and be confident in that. Because when you come to the point of stating your price or your value in the negotiation and what your salary expectations are, you want to say that number with confidence and conviction. So if there is a negotiation, you can back up why that value is the way it is. And if you don’t know your value, I’ll highly suggest going and speaking to a recruiter or several recruiters to get a view on what the industry benchmark is.

And once you know what the benchmark is, you can work with that recruiter to wash against that, your own level of experience. Because even though there’s a benchmark, the benchmark will be your salary range. You need to know where you sit on that range to understand for the stage that you’re at in your career, what your price tag essentially is or could be. So that’s the first tip about coming into a salary negotiation and making sure it’s successful. You need to know your number. So important.

Tip #2: You want to position your negotiation to come from a place of value

Now, tip number two for negotiating your salary is all about coming from a place of value. So when the company makes the first offer, there’s always going to be a bit of flex and a bit of a wiggle room in the company’s budget to negotiate the salary. The company and the HR person is almost expecting you to have some sort of negotiation in the price of the salary that they offer. And one of the key things here to remember when you’re going through any negotiation, especially with a company for a new role, is that for the right candidate, almost any company is willing to flex the budget.

So what that means is if they make the salary offer and they need you in this role, they said you’re the top candidate, they want you to start immediately. They’re going to flex their budget after they’ve invested all this time in a recruitment process, and maybe they’ve been trying to backfill this role for several months. They want you in that role asap. They’re going to be willing to flex five, 10, maybe even 15 k extra in order just to land you in the role and get this negotiation over the line.

How to negotiate from a place of value

But another really important thing to remember here is that when you’re going into a negotiation with a prospective employer, you want to be cool about it, right? You don’t want to come across as greedy or stingy and haggling over every little dollar. So one of my tips that I actually use in my career that I learned from one of my best friends who works as a very senior role for a very large tech company is that it’s all about coming from a place of value.

So when they make the salary offer and you do decide that you want to actually try and negotiate an extra $10K, $15K, $20K, whatever it is, you always want to be positioning it from a place of value. Now, here’s what I mean by that. So essentially they make the offer, when you come back to them, you want to say something like, I’m really excited about this role.

It seems like a fantastic opportunity and I can’t wait to get started. I’ve had a lot more of a think about the role based on the conversations that I had with the hiring manager or with the recruiter, and I really think there’s a lot of experience, a lot of benefit and a lot of value that I can bring to this role and some of the key projects that we talked about. And for that reason, I will just be looking for an extra $10K, $15K, $20K in terms of the salary that I expect.

But actually state your number. Don’t say, I’m looking for an extra $10K say, I’ll be looking at a salary more like this number. And again, all about framing it from the value that you believe. You can bring this role based on the conversations that you’ve had with the hiring manager, and you can even mention some specific projects that you talked about. Again, just to hang your hat on and to make the value positioning much more tangible and actually irrefutable for the hiring manager or for the recruiter. Hope those two tips help you in your next salary negotiation.

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