Are you looking for a new job? Then here are few tips from Jack Chapman’s book Negotiating Your Salary: How to Make $1000 a Minute. I stumbled upon this book today at Amazon and I liked it. It cost costs $7.27 for a kindle version and paper back are around $10. According to Chapman if we spend a little time up front we can put ourselves in a strong position to negotiate an increased salary when applying for a new job or even during performance reviews. The tips of Chapman sound very useful to me and next time when I change job I’m going follow them.
1. Don’t negotiate salary until you have been offered job – Negotiating salary up front may result in employers ignoring your profile before interviewing you. Let’s say you are ask for $70,000 salary and your employer’s budget is just $55,000. If you start negotiating the salary before interview, employer may not consider your profile for screening. Instead get through the interview process, prove yourself and once employer offers job then start negotiating. If employer sees you as the best fit for their requirements and if you are multi skilled then they don’t mind adjusting their budgets and offering you better salary.
2. Let the employer make the offer first – Always give the opportunity of making salary offer to employer instead of you opening it up. If you open up there are chances of you loosing your salary or loosing a job opportunity. Lets say the job posting budget is $70,000 and without knowing that(most likely we don’t know what employer is up to) if your start the negotiation with $60,000 then it’s a 10K loss. On the flip side if you ask for $90,000 then the job may go to another candidate. Let the employer make the offer and you start negotiating from there.
3. When you hear the offer, repeat the top value – and then be silent. This is my favorite tip and the most likely outcome silence is salary raise. Chapman says when employer offers you a specific amount, repeat the amount and then be silent. Don’t break the silence even if it’s going to continue for a minute. This technique puts a bit of pressure on the employer and there are very good chances for them to increase the offer. Check out the video below to hear from Chapman on more about this tip
4. Negotiate employer’s offer with researched information – Spend good amount of time in researching your industry and the salaries offered for the post you are applying for. There are several sites like glassdoor.com that provides very insightful information about salaries offered by various companies for different job positions. If you have information on the minimum, maximum and average salaries offered for a job it will be very easy for you to negotiate and convince your employer.
The Chapman’s book has very detailed information for each of the above tips as well as extra tips. Check out Chapman’s website for more details on the book as well as for other useful videos.
CC Image credit: flickr/Victor1558