Negotiate Your Best Job Offer
If you do not know how to negotiate you will often leave money, incentives, equity stakes, and lots of "little benefits" on the table during your job interview. Negotiating starts at the moment you contact an individual or potential employer within a company. Most of the people that I coach and counsel feel that negotiating starts during the later stages of the hiring and interview process. Ask someone. When do job search negotiations start? The answers I get? During the interview process. When you get to the offer. When they start talking about money. This incorrect mindset hands the hiring company or organization all the cards. Be prepared. Be thorough but try to play an inside out game. Try to find out what the elements are of the total job offer from small to large during the process.
Negotiations in any arena, jobs included, often seem like some Las Vegas card game: You have the feeling that the house (the hiring company) knows the game is rigged, you (the jobseeker) may feel they are eyeing you through the black camera glass on the ceiling, knowing odds favor them by about a million to one. So how do you, the job seeker, flip the odds in your favor? How do you flip without being obnoxious or arrogant? Let me share with you an overview of the psyche of most jobseekers through James.
James interviewed for a nice position in operations with an early state biotech company; he won an offer and started working. It is now almost two years later. Time has given James some perspective. After many discussions with internal employees after he started working he realized lost in his negotiation process. He hadn't realized how marketable he was compared to the peer group he interviewed against. He failed to find out how he could have structured a better employment agreement with a small biotech from the very beginning because he really didn't know the preferences and possibilities from the insider perspective.
Start your new job off right with the right offer. Give yourself every advantage. Try to get to know salaries, preferences and internal personnel as you begin your job search and work your way through the hiring negotiation stages. Then when you do get an offer you continue to negotiate elements from salary and beyond that will help you and help the company keep you happy.
With any company and especially with a smaller company you can negotiate and get clarification on many parts of your job offer. People like James forget this in the haste of negotiations. What are those elements that you should consider in any full-time job offer? Here are some: Compensation, Start Dates, Raises, Bonuses, Performance Evaluations, Vacation Policy, Sick Days, Personal Days Allowed, Health Insurance, Dental Insurance, Vision Insurance, Life Insurance, Disability Insurance, Community Service, Volunteer Programs on Company Time, Educational and Professional Development, Mentoring Programs, Spouse Assistance and Benefits, Time Off For Family Issues and Special Needs Children/Adults.
Most individuals seeking jobs often start with the wrong assumptions. Let's review some critical assumptions and elements that put a person like James or like you at an immediate and long-term disadvantage or advantage during a job search, interview and negotiation process:
How the Hiring Food Chain Works. It has been said that the best experience to learn from is other people's experience. DON'T assume you know more about how the hiring process works than the company who is hiring you.
You will never know what the company knows about hiring even if you talk to former employees, current employees or review sites such as Glassdoor.com for insider information.
The Process and The Reality. Corporations and organizations must comply with the law and have their own proprietary hiring practices. What is another intangible that most people miss? It is that hiring decision-makers have their own personal preferences in candidates that are not easy to understand. If you have ever worked with a group or committee everyone has a preference and what they really want in a hire is muddy. All of this boils down to the fact that one person or a small group's opinion may dominate the hiring decision. That's the reality so try to get to know the key decision maker because when it is time to push the added negotiation points you have an insider, a friend and an advocate.
What's the point here? Personal preferences drive more hiring decisions than most people ever know. Realizing this should let you know that although most companies and organizations hiring practices are beyond reproach the human element will never be removed. So your networking internally within the company is paramount to you getting through the murky waters, getting an interview, getting an advantage with the true hiring manager and negotiating your best position.
Being the biotech, high analysis guy, James thought that downloading every piece of information about the company from the Internet and reading current news would prepare him completely for the interview and for negotiations he would face. According to James: "I could have put myself at an advantage in the negotiation process if would put more effort in getting to know the company and how it would handle questions on negotiations. I had a couple of advocates by the time I was done interviewing. In hindsight and in talking to them since I started working here they said they would have gladly helped me negotiate more on my job offer. Lesson learned. But I was so intent on getting the job I kept thinking not to push when I should have developed some rapport and used them to help me get the best offer."
James didn't realize that he could have designed and tinkered with the employment agreement. "The company would have signed off on it. I know that because they have added some things to their agreements and I have worked with HR to help them do that. In the end it has been good for the company. But it is still up to the individual to push when it is time to push and know what to negotiate. It sounds greedy but it's really not." It is a win-win mindset to think like this and many people within companies appreciate the attention to detail.
If James would have found out how creative he could have been with the initial offer and how he could have understood the internals of the company, he could have structured a much more favorable employment agreement. As James says now: "I just saw this agreement come back, felt like this was a good offer and did not want to rock the boat."
Let's put it this way. Know how the system for hiring works but try like heck to know the people influencing the system. You are not rocking any boats by negotiating an agreement that will make you even more motivated and devoted to the company in the long haul. In the end that is a win for both parties.