“So these guys want to hire me as their Marketing Manager,” says my friend Belinda on the phone, “and the thing sounds great, I love the job and they have offices in my two favorite cities, and then the guy tells me the offer.”
“You didn’t like it,” I volunteer. “It was ridiculous,” says Belinda. “It was exactly what I made when I worked at AT & T in their corporate offices. I took that job in 1997.”
“Ouch,” I say. There’s something truly horrible about getting a job offer that sounds great in every way except in the part that buys your gas and groceries. “I told them I was insulted,” adds Belinda, “and I haven’t heard from them since.”
You can certainly tell a hiring manager or the company HR rep that you’re insulted by the offer – but who wins, then? Sometimes we can get a wonderful, slightly delusional hiring manager back on track by coaching him or her to remember why s/he’s hiring someone (and someone as talented as you are, to boot) and to reconsider what that new hire’s services are worth to the organization.
The problem with miffed responses like “I made that much in the nineties” and “I paid my administrative assistant that salary” is that retorts like those don’t help your boss understand your value or – even more importantly – sell the idea of paying you much more money to the purse-string-holding executives on a higher floor of the building. If we get indignant and walk away from a lowball salary offer, we retain nothing – not the relationships we built during the interview process nor the prospect of a job with these folks. That’s a bad way to leave a selection pipeline, and a waste of your precious time and mental energy. Here’s another way to play it:
RRRIIINNNGGG!
You: Sally Jones.
Him: Hi Sally! It’s Karl Rogers. Great news – I got the okay today to make you a job offer. We’re excited to get you over here and get cracking!
You: Great news, Karl! Thanks so much for calling. That’s exciting. I have a million ideas.
Him: I know, and I’m dying to talk when we both have time and start putting plans together. Can you start in two weeks?
You: I can, assuming we come to terms: want to share the details? I can’t wait to hear.
Him: The salary isn’t as much as I had hoped, but I need to get you in here to show people what you can do, and then the sky’s the limit.
You: (resisting the urge to say ‘Oh, puh-leeze, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that!’) So, the title is Marketing Manager, correct?
Him: Right.
You: …and the position reports to you, and the package is…?
Him: Forty-eight thousand five hundred, two weeks vacation, and a ten-percent performance bonus opportunity; and we have great medical.
You: Ah! Okay. Thanks, Karl. I know it’s not the world’s greatest assignment to have to call people and make offers that aren’t as financially exciting as you might hope.
Him: Right, you see my problem. If you could start at that, I know it’s not the best, but…
You: Okay Karl, no problem. Can I ask you a couple of questions?
Him: Sure!
You: Look, I respect you totally, and I know you are ethical and very committed to the company and your team. I appreciate that. I think I may have gotten confused somewhere along the line. You and I had been talking about the problem with sales leads, and the pipeline breakdowns, some pretty sales-oriented and revenue-critical projects.
Him: Absolutely. That’s the job – those are my priorities.
You: When we were together, we talked about what the sales-lead bottlenecks were doing to revenues. We came up with a number, I think it was a hundred and twenty thousand a quarter, that that problem is costing you. Is that your recollection too, or did I get that wrong?
Him: No, that’s right in the ballpark. You figure that a lot of that delta is in the cost of the product, and then you take out overhead, and it gives me just about fifty thousand to spend solving that problem.
You: I get it, Karl. I was thinking that the problem you were facing had bigger ramifications for the company – to be honest I saw it as a bigger job, with more mission-critical impact. It’s not just the money. I really need to be in positions where my work has a direct effect on the bottom line. Otherwise, my resume suffers and the work isn’t interesting.
Him: Oh, this definitely does.
You: I’m not feeling that, Karl, in the forty-eight-five comp package. The good thing is, there are zillions of marketing people on the street.
Him: Come on Sally, I really need your help. It sounds like you’re not accepting the offer.
You: I’d love to do it Karl, but that’s twelve thousand under my absolute floor. If we could get creative and figure out how to bridge the gap –
Him: I could do a six-month review, instead of a one-year.
You: That helps a bit. Could you look at a sign-on bonus?
Him: Maybe, a couple thousand dollars.
You: I can’t take the job for forty-eight five, Karl, but I could start around fifty-five with a two-thousand-dollar signing bonus and a six-month review, if you can do four weeks of vacation.
Him: Geez Louise.
You: Karl, do you think you’re getting a great deal? Because if not, and I totally understand that – you should hire someone else.
Him: I can’t commit to all of that, but I’ll try.
You: Then the only other thing would be to decide what the milestones are, that we shoot for at that six-month review, that get me from fifty-five in base salary up to sixty.With the ten percent bonus, that would –
Him: Wait wait wait! That would be sixty-six, with the bonus.
You: You could wrap the first year’s performance bonus into the salary increase. No bonus, just the salary bump if I hit the milestones we’d agree on, at the six-month point.
Him: I can’t budge my CFO up to fifty-five.
You: No problem. Whatever can’t go into the base can go into the performance bonus.
Him: You’re bringing back the bonus?
You: Well, you have the bonus program in place anyway. I’d only need in the bonus whatever piece was missing from our salary target of fifty-five.
Him: My God, I should get you negotiating with our vendors.
You: I’d be delighted to do that.
You don’t have to grovel, and you don’t have to get huffy when a salary offer doesn’t knock your socks off. Remember your value, keep your emotions in check, and negotiate a better deal on the spot.