What Negotiation It's Really For (It’s not what you think)
Once you’ve been offered a job, it’s time to negotiate. Yes, you should always negotiate! You’ve probably heard that the reason for this is that you don’t want to leave money on the table. If you leave money on the table that means you are making less money than you could be making and less money is bad (and has a compounding effect over time).
This is true, you don’t want to leave money on the table, but that is not the reason you negotiate, you negotiate to find out if you really want the job.
Presumably, if you are negotiating an offer with a person or an organization, you think you want the job. If you’re negotiating in good faith, and they’re negotiating in good faith, everyone is hoping it will work out and you will be happily employed before long. But here’s the thing, until you’ve concluded the negotiation, you can’t be 100% sure you want the job, and here’s why: the negotiation is the closest you are going to get to seeing the true colors of your potential future employer while still in the hiring process.
Ideally, if the hiring process has been professional and transparent, you have a decent sense of what the role is all about and what a reasonable salary would be. Hopefully, the person you are dealing with is a mature professional. They’ll make an offer, you’ll counter, they’ll come back with some variation on your counter, and you’ll either accept or decline. Of course, that’s just the basic framework, but you get the idea.
The reality, though, is that lots and lots of people in the professional world, who are responsible for hiring people, have no idea what they are doing.
A friend of mine got an offer at a start-up recently, but the young men (yep, it was all men, in their late twenties) who made the offer said they didn’t negotiate and it was an “exploding offer,” meaning he only had twenty-four hours to decide. This was concerning negotiation behavior for a number of reasons.
First off, “exploding offers” are designed to pressure candidates into accepting. No grounded, mature professional should be trying to coerce you into taking a job. Why on earth would they want to hire someone who made a hasty, possibly rash decision? Everyone benefits when candidates make deliberate, thoughtful choices about accepting a role. I’m not sure why those guys thought this was a good idea, but my guess is they read about it on a start-up blog or thought that kind of high-octane hiring behavior would make their company more competitive (it won’t).
Secondly, everyone negotiates. My friend said twenty-four hours didn’t work for him, and so they said he could have forty-eight. They were already negotiating.
After some thought, my friend countered, asking for a 10k increase (they had come in low, at 80k in New York City; my friend has four years of robust start up experience).
The start-up pulled the offer.
This is, usually, what people are afraid of when they negotiate, that the person they are negotiating with will change their minds. As my story proves, this does in fact happen sometimes.
But by the time they had pulled the offer, my friend was so disgusted with their behavior he couldn’t fathom working for them. He was concerned they would continue to undervalue him, refuse to consider his needs and pressure him inappropriately the way they tried to with the “exploding offer.”
Their behavior really begged the question: if they didn’t think he was worth around 10% over what they were offering, why did they bother to offer him a job at all?
Granted, there are dozens of things to consider when negotiating a job offer: what you want, what the job is worth to you, what you are willing to accept, if you are willing to walk away, to name a few.
But it is also worth keeping in mind that taking a job is a relatively big decision. It’s going to have a big effect on your life.
If you don’t like how you were treated during the negotiation, chances are you may not like how you are treated on the job.