Asking for a good salary can feel like an imposition: as though the company is doing you a favour by giving you money. This can result in people accepting a much lower salary than they should and can result in a lack of job satisfaction and even the need to find another income stream in order to maintain your basic standard of living. Here are six tips for successful salary negotiation.
Know Your Worth
Do you have degrees? How much experience do you have? What transferrable skills do you have? These are all questions that employers will ask you, expecting you to have ready answers – but make sure you assign a pound value to your skills. While it is relatively easy to find information about hard skills: qualified accountants with these qualifications can expect this salary, it is a different ball-game when it comes to softer skills. These can include being very organised: a previously stay-at-home mum will be used to, for example, running three children around to different afternoon activities, baking cakes overnight for cake sales, allocating time to be a Reading Buddy three afternoons a week, and making sure everyone is fed, clean, homeworked and in bed at an appropriate hour – all of which speak to excellent logistical planning which can offer value to a company.
Know What You Need
Understand what level of income you need. Work out all your monthly expenses, not forgetting your Netflix subscription, the glossy magazine you treat yourself to once a month or so, and even your pre-workout brand-name coffee. Then add half again as much. That should be you base asking price. If you are terrible at negotiating, double it! That allows you more leeway to come down to an acceptable salary, rather than starting low and finishing below your expenditure line.
Consult if Unsure
If the above two points have you shaking your head because you simply don’t know how to convert your life experiences into useful transferrable skills or – perhaps even more importantly – how to put a price tag on those skills, then you should ask someone. Recruiters love to match people with their dream jobs and these London headhunters are no different. They have ways of ascertaining your transferrable skills and are adept at finding a realistic salary range for those skills. They may also be able to help you into a new industry – one that perhaps didn’t even exist when you first began work. Once you have been reassured as to your skill level and have a good understanding of what sort of salary you can expect to be offered, you can begin to go for interviews.
Query the Range
There is a modern tendency for companies not to supply salary information with the job description – and this is, frankly, an unscrupulous ploy that should be stamped out as soon as possible. Not only does it permit HR officers and hiring managers to get away with offering salaries that are below the industry average, but it retains the gender and diversity pay-gap disparities. If a job is worth, for example, thirty thousand pounds a year, it is worth that no matter who takes the job: male, female, black, white, gay or straight. Don’t be scared of asking what the salary range is, and what a realistic starting salary would be for this position. Companies that act as if asking about renumeration is a no-no tend to be those that foster secrecy and mistrust between workers and management and even between the workers themselves.
Don’t Panic!
Try not to become flustered. If you have been speaking to a recruitment consultant about the job, you know that you have the qualifications the job description asked for. Allow this to give you the confidence to know that you can do the job if only given the chance. Sometimes managers might test your knowledge by asking an obscure question: simply be honest and ask for clarification or say that you do not understand the term they used. If it is a trick question, you have not fallen for it: if not, then you will learn something new that you can research later in your own time.
Stick to Your Guns
Finally, stick to your guns: you have done your research and made your calculations. You know what salary you need, and you know that this job should be paying out at that level. If offered a lower salary, do not be scared to say, “Unfortunately, I cannot accept that: I need a salary of £X.” If they try to call your bluff, be prepared to leave there and then: you are worth a decent salary and if your skills are as good as they should, the hiring manager will buckle first!
