Glassdoor

Glassdoor (www.glassdoor.com), shown in Figure 14-1, is the most popular and best known website for obtaining salary information and for reading reviews from employees about companies they worked or currently work for.

You don’t even have to go to the Glassdoor website to find information about the specific company you’re looking for. In Google, type glassdoor followed by the name of the company and the company office location and then press Enter.

For example, if you type Glassdoor HPE Roseville, you’ll see a list of reviews for the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise facility in Roseville, California. The entry at the top of the results list shown in Figure 14-2 has the link to the reviews page on Glassdoor as well as the aggregated rating for the company based on one (bad) to five (great) stars.

Comparably

You can quickly find the overall score employees give their employers on the Comparably website (www.comparably.com), shown in Figure 14-3.

All you have to do on the Comparably site is type the name of the company you want to search in the Search box and then press Enter. A list of search results appears on the results page.

Open the results page by clicking the company name or associated photo in the results list. The culture score appears prominently on the company page, and the score is ranked using the classroom scale of A+ to F. For example, Figure 14-4 shows that Google gets a ranking of A+.

You can also learn about salaries for a specific job title in a specific city by clicking Salaries in the menu bar at the top of every web page on the site. Then you can add the specific job title and postal ZIP code to find the average salary for that area.

This information is useful to find out if that average will give you enough money to live comfortably in the city where you work, or if you’ll have to live in a more affordable area and commute daily. If the average won’t work for you, you’ll need to increase your planned salary offer accordingly.

CareerBliss

The CareerBliss website (www.careerbliss.com) allows you to find jobs, research salaries in your area, and read company reviews, as shown in Figure 14-5. One interesting feature of CareerBliss is that it compiles an annual list of the 50 happiest companies in the United States based on tens of thousands of employee reviews.

You can also search for salaries by job title if you want to get a more general idea of what companies are paying people like you. Type the company name in the Search box to get more specific information.

What’s more, you can search for companies in the Read Company Reviews section on the home page. In the results page, you can view the number of reviews and the aggregated scores based on a 1 (bad) to 5 (great) star scale. Read individual reviews by clicking the number of reviews to the right of the star icons, such as “160 Reviews.”

Learning the company’s cards

The company representatives already have an advantage because they’ve researched salary information — probably more than you have — and they also know what they’re paying their own employees. So, they want to use one of three strategies to pay you as little salary as possible when you start your job:

• They want to get a number from you and then give you a slightly higher offer so it looks like they’re being generous.
• If you give the company representatives a salary amount that’s on the lower end of their wage scale, or a number that’s even lower than the wage scale because you haven’t done your homework, then they’ll offer that lower amount. If you discover later that you should have asked for a higher amount and you try to negotiate a higher wage, the company representatives will claim the wage they’ve offered is in line with your expectations.
• If you answer with a number that’s too high, the company may not want to pay you that much money … at least not right away. If you can’t negotiate a lower salary to start and work up to the salary you’re looking for over time — that is, if the company is even willing to negotiate — then the company will walk away from the table.

Keeping your cards close to your vest

So, the name of this negotiation game is that the person who offers the amount first loses, and it’s important that the company gives you the first offer. Company representatives know this, too, and that’s why they’ll be so insistent on asking you some variant of “What are you looking for?”

You can politely answer these salary-related questions in one of several ways depending on your feel of the situation:

• I would rather not talk about that right now.
• I can’t reveal that amount because it’s proprietary information from my current employer.
• I’d rather not reveal that information because I think it would put me in a disadvantage.
• I don’t want to reveal that information because I don’t see how it’s relevant to the job you’re hiring me for.
• I prefer to discuss salary and other benefits when we decide we’re going to work together.
• I have a full benefits package and salary is just one part of it, so the salary part by itself doesn’t give me enough context to be used in any kind of evaluation or negotiation.
• I’ll consider any reasonable offer.

Forcing your hand

If someone from human resources or your potential boss insists on salary information to move on, then based on the homework you did finding salary information online, it’s best to give a salary range that’s at the higher end of your expectations.

Then the company will finally give you an offer that will likely be at the low end of that range, but at least you can still negotiate the price higher because now the company representatives know the range they’re working with.

Giving a counteroffer

You may be afraid to negotiate because you think you’re going to lose the job, especially if this is the job you dreamed of or you need a job right now.

Here’s our counteroffer for your brain: You need to understand who’s the most important person in the conversation. (Yes, you.) If you’re still not convinced, we recommend you read the book, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz (HarperBusiness). After you read it, you’ll understand why Voss and Raz subtitled the book, Negotiating as If Your Life Depended on It — because it does.

It’s also natural to think that if you counteroffer with a number that you think the company will see as too high, then it’s more acceptable to meet in the middle of what the company has offered and what your desired highest salary is. Then the company representative will counteroffer with an amount that’s lower than what you think the middle is. Congratulations! You’ve just lost a lot of money.

So, counteroffer with your high amount. The company representative likely expects that, too, because he expects your counteroffer will come with a little wiggle room, and you’ll be willing to accept a somewhat lower salary than your counteroffer amount. In the worst-case scenario, the company representative won’t negotiate and will say that the offer is final. Then you’ll have to review the rest of the company’s proposed benefits package and see if you can negotiate one or more of those benefits.

Making counteroffers and getting more money won’t just improve your life and livelihood right now, but also in the future as you grow with the company. After all, you expect to get raises at some point, so you need to remember that raises are usually based on the percentage of your pay. If your pay is higher, then your raises will be higher, too. What’s more, if you’re going to get another job in the future, then the higher pay from your current job will likely lead to an even higher starting salary at your new job.

Negotiating more than salary

The first negotiation session is usually about salary, but that’s only one of the cards in the company’s hand. The rest have to do with other benefits the company is offering. These benefits could offset a lower salary if you get more flexibility in your job and more opportunities for making a lot of money if you think those opportunities will come in a reasonable amount of time.

For example, you can make counteroffers about a signing bonus for joining the company, the amount of time off you get, the 401(k) matching amount, and how many shares of company stock you get.

There may be other options in the package to negotiate. If the company is a startup, you may be able to negotiate an ownership stake when the company meets clear financial milestones.

You could negotiate your roles and responsibilities. If there’s the opportunity to work from home, you can negotiate how often you can do that. You can even negotiate the equipment the company will provide you to get your job done.

Avoiding pitting companies against each other

It’s possible you’ll be negotiating with one company knowing that you already have one or more offers from other companies. This is one card you don’t want to play because it makes it very easy for the company to withdraw its offer.

So, play it straight. Don’t respond to the company’s offer by saying, “Hey, I got a higher offer from another company that has also offered me a job.” The company representatives will likely ask you what that offer is.

Tell them and they’ll counteroffer with a slightly higher offer than what the other company is offering, and you’ll be prevented from getting the highest amount possible. If you don’t, and they have to guess, then one of two things may happen.

First, you may get a much higher offer than what you were expecting, but they’ll still get a bad vibe about you and they may not be as willing to negotiate other parts of your benefits package. Worse, people in the company will talk about it, and you don’t want to come into a new job with people giving you the side eye.

The other result is that they’ll see you as unprofessional and possibly lying to them, withdraw their offer, thank you for your interest, and escort you from the building.

If you want to mention that you’re entertaining multiple offers, you can do so at the end of the negotiation. You don’t have to tell the company representatives about the other offers or even the companies’ names because you should always presume that company recruiters talk to each other. That’s especially true if you’re looking for jobs in the same geographic area, and those recruiters can ensure you won’t play cards with them anytime soon.

Walking away

The best negotiators are those who are willing and able to walk away. The company you’re interviewing with is certainly willing to walk away if it can’t get you to agree because it likely has second and third choices for the job.

The best way to look out for number one (yes, you) is to ensure that you’re interviewing with multiple companies and, better yet, have at least one other offer from another company. If you’ve applied at a number of companies and interviewed well with at least a few of them, it’s likely you’ll have the ability to walk away from the company’s table, too.

What’s more, you should have some side projects that you’re working on so you’re still generating income if you have to walk away. You don’t want to be in a situation where the company you’re negotiating with is the only one you’ve applied to and interviewed with. In that situation you’ll be more desperate to take any offer whether you realize it or not.

If you decide to walk away, do so in a respectful way — don’t be angry, threatening, or plain old nasty. (And we don’t mean in a Janet Jackson sort of way.) You can say, “Hey, this isn’t what I’m looking for. I’m sorry we couldn’t come to an agreement, but this isn’t the right opportunity for me. I’d love to work for you, and I’m sure we could do great things together, but we can’t agree about the job benefits and that’s okay.”

Being polite and respectful will leave the company representatives still thinking highly of you — so much so that they may decide to continue negotiations. They may even offer you more because you’re head and shoulders above their other choices, or their second and/or third choices don’t work out.

What’s more, one day in the future, this company may invite you to apply for a different job with you specifically in mind, which is the best kind of job offer to get. Then don’t be surprised if you end up with a better hand than you had during your first card game.