Negotiating Salary - It's Worth It!

You go through all of the hard work of pounding the pavement and hunting down job openings. You drop off your resume. A few days later, you get the phone call: they want to interview you! You do your research and fully prepare, and the interview goes great. They say, "We'll be in touch." Your work is done, right? Wrong!

Five great questions of life: Life * Love * Learning * Labor * Leadership

Negotiating Salary - It's Worth It!

You go through all of the hard work of pounding the pavement and hunting down job openings. You drop off your resume. A few days later, you get the phone call: they want to interview you! You do your research and fully prepare, and the interview goes great. They say, "We'll be in touch." Your work is done, right? Wrong!

When they call you back, if you're favored enough to be offered the job, there will be a thirty second conversation about salary that could make a difference of thousands of dollars for your over the next few years.

I freely confess that I've been less than wonderful in my own salary negotiations over the years. I'm getting much better. Dr. James Allen back at NCBC tried to tell us to make our case as graduates for what we needed to live on. In church work it's tricky because talking salary seems so unspiritual. It's not. Whatever type of work you consider, no one will represent your interests better than you.

How to make it happen...
Let me direct you first to an outstanding free podcast on iTunes. Look for the GTD Virtual Study Group, and don't worry about what GTD stands for unless you want to branch off into a productivity and time management series. Just find the April 21, 2011 podcast entitled: Special Edition: Interview with Jim Hopkinson. It's an outstanding 28 minute interview based on the book in the picture above.

Here are a few of my takeaways from the interview:

1. Research - Research the normal salary for the position on salary.com, glassdoor.com and payscale.com.
2. Wait! - Don't write a desired salary on your resume. They might screen you as either too high or too low before they even meet you.
3. Wait some more! - Try not to talk about salary until you've been offered the job. If they ask what you're hoping to make, tell them you'd like to know more about the expectations of the job before discussing salary.
4. Redirect - If they ask what you're making now, it's really none of their business. Say something like, "There wasn’t much research for people moving from bookkeeper to event planner. What did you have in mind?” They have a job and a budget, they should be forthcoming at some point.
5. Share your research - Once they offer you the job, be prepared to talk about the range of salaries you found in your research and why you feel you should be in the upper end of that range, for example.

Jim Hopkinson's two major goals for the interview process are to be able to say afterward:

1. I was prepared.
2. I did what I could.

Obviously, some of the jobs out there aren't resume- and salary-negotiation-type jobs. But when you get to that point, be ready! It will pay you back for decades to come!