💰Money Talks: A Salary Negotiation Framework

You’ve aced your interviews, met and fit well with your future colleagues, and the hiring team is looking to move towards final steps. The offer is within your reach, which uncovers a number of mixed emotions. You’re excited to get your new salary and start a new job, however, you feel uneasy when it comes to talking about money and negotiating. You’re not alone. Many people find discussing topics around money difficult, whether it’s discussing money in personal, professional, or social settings.

Discussing money in professional settings and salary can add another layer of difficulty when there might be a power imbalance between employer and employee. When anticipating the conversation around salary offers and negotiations you may be wondering: Is the compensation offered fair based on my experience? What is the industry standard? Am I getting the best offer possible or am I selling myself short?

Negotiations are tough. As a recruiter and career coach, I’ve developed a framework and tips for salary negotiations and I’d like to share the approach I use with my clients so that you feel comfortable and prepared to get the offer that you deserve.

Thought Exercise 🧠

When you hear the words “negotiation” or “salary negotiation”, what are the first 2-3 words that pop up in your head? Why? 

A few concepts that have popped up for my clients are: “discomfort”, “selling myself short”, “confrontation”, “alignment”, and “agreement”. It’s important to understand your outlook and experience with negotiations, so that you know how to address your own emotional response before going into a negotiation. For example, if you’re worried about confrontation - a negative connotation of negotiations, you can unpack why you feel that way and the experiences that have led to this feeling. If you have negative associations with negotiations, can you find a similar word or feeling that is neutral or positive? Instead of seeing negotiations as confrontation, which might close the job seeker off, can you change the approach and idea of a negotiation to an alignment or discussion? This will help you see the concept of negotiation in a more neutral light.

Negotiation Framework

In order to be successful during negotiations, it is helpful to better understand negotiations and what they are. While we like to think of negotiations as relate to money and business, there are several negotiations that we participate in during everyday life.

Framework 1: Defining Negotiations

Any situation when you’re in a conversation with someone and one person wants something can be seen as a negotiation. Maybe you’re planning lunch with a friend and they would like to have lunch near their home, which happens to be 40 minutes away from you. You both want to have lunch, however, you have different ideas of where to have lunch. This can be seen as a negotiation. Negotiations happen around us all the time.

Framework 2: How to Approach Negotiations

Approach negotiations with compassion. When you’re in a negotiation it will be clear that one person wants something from the other. Now is the step where we use compassion to understand why. For a successful negotiation, each party should spend time asking questions, gathering information, empathizing, learning, and getting to a mutual understanding. Let’s go back to the situation where your friend wants you to travel to their neighborhood for lunch. Are they just looking for the most convenient resolution for themselves or is there a hidden reasoning? Asking questions and gathering information could potentially reveal that your friend has a packed day with an appointment nearby, and staying in their neighborhood is the only way they will be able to find time for lunch. Now that you better understand the situation, you can move to the final framework.

Framework 3: Joint Problem Solving

At the end of the day, both parties would like to get to a resolution and this should be done together with joint problem solving. Now that the situation has been discussed further, how can the two parties come to a mutual understanding where both benefit? Now that your friend has revealed their busy schedule, perhaps you can come up with a solution to meet closer to their doctor’s appointment because it’s more convenient for your daily plans. Now you have been able to joint problem solve on the meeting location and can focus on the fun life updates you plan to give each other.

Now that you have this negotiation framework down, you’re probably eager to see it applied to the salary negotiations directly. Stay tuned for the part 2 which walks through negotiating your best job offer.