Fearless Salary Negotiation

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about job searching, job salary negotiating and how to do it. Moreover, it also delves a bit into the data on negotiating and also a bit about how to use techniques to negotiate.

🎨 Impressions

I liked it. It was interesting.

The salary negotiation should use 10-20% above your offer.

✍️ My Top Quotes

Fearless Salary Negotiation is a guide to getting paid what you’re worth. But it’s also something deeper—it’s an exposé on how companies determine salaries and job titles, and how they think about raises and promotions.
A job is a set of responsibilities to be performed by an employee. That set of responsibilities is usually described in a “job description”, which you’ve probably seen before. Most jobs have a job title like “Consultant” or “Accountant”
A career path is a series of jobs in succession. For example, a typical career path for a Software Developer might be something like this: Jr. Developer → Developer → Sr. Developer → Team Lead
Most companies are structured so that each job has a paygrade or payband that describes the lower and upper ends of the pay range for that particular job.
Promotions happen when you move up to the next job in your career path, and it usually represents a jump to a higher paygrade as well.
Raises are when you move to a higher salary. This may mean just moving “up” (to the right, toward the top of the paygrade) in your current paygrade, or it could mean moving into a higher paygrade and moving “up” within that new paygrade.
For example, the reason you shouldn’t give the first number in a salary negotiation is that you don’t know what your potential employer’s paygrades look like. But they know what their paygrades look like, and they probably have to offer you something in an appropriate paygrade.
Most companies (especially in the United States) frown upon openly discussing salaries. This is partly why: if you know what your peers—people doing your job, at your company, in your geographic region—are making, then you have a pretty good sense of what you should be making too.
Finally, you need to be prepared to answer the following two-part question: “So where are you right now in terms of salary, and what are you looking for if you make this move?”
It’s best if you do not disclose either your current salary or your desired salary during the interview process.
My pat answer to the “what are you looking for” part of the dreaded salary question is, “I want this move to be a big step forward for me in terms of both responsibility and compensation.”
Make sure you show up early so that you’re waiting on Andy to begin. Never keep your interviewer waiting—there are few faster ways to make a very bad first impression. Odds are that Andy has just left a meeting, or ended a client call, or scarfed down his lunch so he could make sure you get started on time. If you’re late, he’ll be frustrated right out of the gate. Frustrated people aren’t likely to recommend their frustrators for jobs.
Take a notebook and a pen. Don’t make a big show of it, but take some notes during your conversation. You may want those notes later, and it looks more professional. (Yes, this is basically just acting. You should still do it.) Make sure to bring multiple copies of your résumé, printed on good paper with good ink.
It’s generally okay to send a follow-up email to someone who interviews you, but calling them is a little too personal.
The interview is two opportunities in one. It’s an opportunity to pitch yourself and convince a company to hire you, and it’s an opportunity for you to determine whether you really want to do a particular job for a particular company.
Most people don’t get many job offers, and they see them as special snowflakes that come along only a few times in a lifetime. This reverence for new jobs spills over into the negotiation process, so they treat negotiations very gingerly, afraid to jeopardize them.
Most recruiters make job offers all the time, and they tend to see everything as numbers—the candidate has an applicant ID, the job requisition has a number, the paygrade for the job is just a range of numbers. If they can get a good candidate at a good salary, that’s a good day for them.
It’s not just numbers to you because the outcome of this negotiation will affect your life.
The numbers have real meaning to you, so you have far more skin in the game than the recruiter.
Fight for as much money as you can get because this is your final chance to maximize your pay before you’re in the door, confined by the rules for raises and promotions inside the company.
Just like the interview process, the salary negotiation process generally looks very similar across companies. Here’s what the process usually looks like: Preparation Post-interview follow-up Initial offer
Here’s what the process usually looks like: Preparation Post-interview follow-up Initial offer Your counter Preparing for the final discussion Final discussion
You have two main objectives before you begin negotiating: Understand why you are a valuable candidate for this job Determine the minimum salary you require to do this job
This is a ballpark number that you’ll keep private. It’s one metric for measuring your success in this negotiation. It represents what you think you’ll get without using what you learn in this chapter. Think of it like this: This ballpark figure is what you’d answer if someone surprised you right after you sent your first application to the company by asking, “If they offered this job to you right now, what do you think they’d pay you?”
A good range for a counter is between 10% and 20% above their initial offer.
First, let’s set a baseline for raise sizing: Small raise: 1% Normal raise: 2-3% Good raise: 4-7% Big raise: 8%
His answer was, “I look for people that are already working in and exploring areas outside their own, and I promote them.” In other words, he was looking for people already doing the jobs he needed to fill.
“How do you find the people that you promote to be your VPs and SVPs?” I wanted to know the secret sauce for finding untapped potential, for identifying future superstars so that I could get promoted myself, and so that I too would know how to find talent. His answer was, “I look for people that are already working in and exploring areas outside their own, and I promote them.” In other words, he was looking for people already doing the jobs he needed to fill.
Real talk: You may not need most of the remaining information in this chapter to get a nice raise. Your best ammo is the market mid-point data, augmented with a general sense of how you stack up against an “average” employee doing your job.