How to Negotiate Salary Without Losing the Job Offer

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed on the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W four WN Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsement for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability, explicit or implied shall be extended to W four WN Radio. It's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comment should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W four WN Radio. This is Beyond Confidence with your host d W Park. Do you want to live a more fulfilling life? Do you want to live your legacy and achieve your personal, professional, and financial goals? Well? Coming up on Dvparks Beyond Confidence, you will hear real stories of leaders, entrepreneurs, and achievers who have stepped into discomfort, shattered their status quo, and are living the life they want.

0:47 You will learn how relationships are the key to achieving your aspirations and financial goals. Moving your career business forward does not have to happen at the expense of your personal or family life or vice versa. Learn more at www Don't divpork dot com and you can connect with div at contact edts divpark dot com. This is beyond confidence and now here's your host, div Park. Good morning listeners, It's Tuesday and so much fun to be here. So today's conversation is everyone's thinking about it, regardless whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're a professional, shall I go for that ask when I am changing jobs or if you're an entrepreneur I'm providing a lot of value, can I increase my prices? And this has been an age old question that I have seen my clients ask time and time again, and that's what we are going to be tackling today. So stay tuned, and I want to think each and every one of you who have got a book, especially the agency, which in today's day in world is a very important thing because those days are gone when we were thinking about AI. Maybe there in the future, AI has stepped into a daily workflows.

2:15 So if you are looking to future proof your career, or even if you're thinking, how can I keep on expanding in the era of AI, how can I use it in a way that will enhance and augment my career in entrepreneurship, then that the book is for you, and I do want to say thank you to all of you who reach out to us and get a box. Thank you, thank you, thank you, and let's get started. Welcome John, Thanks. So much, Davia. It is so great to be here with you today.

2:56 Oh, excited for our conversation John. So, John, do you recall a moment in your youth that may have shaped the rest of your life? Then it was a moment or a person that left a positive mark on you. Yeah. Yeah, Actually, the thing that strikes me the most is probably a story when I was early in my career and I was moving from Portland, Oregon, all the way to Richmond, Virginia, which is about as far away from Oregon as you can be and still be in the United States. That was a huge move and I'd always lived in Oregon for my whole lifetime, was born, raised here, and eventually just leapt into the Fortune five hundred.

3:44 But this was a pivotal experience because I was interviewing with Capital One Financial and they had the most difficult and challenging pay negotiation process and interview and process that I'd ever seen anywhere, and it was exciting for me. I was a young recruiter I'd been maybe five six years of experience, got a chance to go work for them. Their selection process was designed to kill nine out of ten applicants. That's nine out of ten people that are interviewing are not getting an offer there. It was just so difficult. I had to pass twenty four different behavioral interview screens, a business case interview, and three tests, three big long brain assessments. And so at the end of that process, this guy named Chip who was my recruiter through the process of capital Ie recruiter, and he and I are still friends today. This was nineteen ninety eight, so a long time ago. He came into the room and I'm like mopping the blood off of myself because it was is such a harrowing experience. I couldn't believe I'd just been through this. He pulled up this chair and sat down next to me, and he said, John, I'm going to give it to you straight here. We have interviewed over twenty people for this IT recruiting position

5:17 that we have open. Right now. We're on the eve of y two k, which was a huge IT looming issue. We really need you. There are only two people that have passed the process and the other guy just withdrew. So what's it going to take to get you to come on board and take this offer? And so Chip and I had a conversation about that, and I said, well, how about more salary, how about a bigger bonus tier, you know, a higher level in the organization to start with. What about the relocation? Could we make that a little bit better because I'm selling a house and buying a house and moving a whole family. And the answers from Chip were yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I mean he said yes to just about everything I put out there.

6:05 And I was so excited to be a flying home to share the news with my family that we were going to be moving to Virginia. Chip was excited, everyone was excited, the hiring manager was excited. But I spent the next like three years, and this is why it was so impactful. I had a good relationship with Chip. If I had handled that a little differently, I might have gotten a lot more. That was a first time, even in my own recruiting career, that I felt this huge level of leverage and I didn't know what to do with that, and I wasn't prepared for it. So I just asked for things and I got everything. And I spent the next three and a half years working at Capital One actually negotiating pay packages for them. Wondering how much money I had left on the table a long time ago, and that just seed, that seed of thought just germinated in my mind for a long long time.

7:02 I started tracking how much money my candidates were leaving on the table and reporting that to my bosses as a win for me. I look at how much I saved the company and negotiation savings over the course of the year. Usually it was ten or twelve times my annual pay. So there was a lot of money being left on the table and that was a huge pivotal moment for me and ultimately led to the founding of Salary Coach, which is the business I run today. So when you talk about and I've seen a lot of my clients be so hesitant, so many executives be hasden like what if they had drawn you off? What if they're an A.

7:51 And there. What happens is for executives is they struggle with it. And in your vast experience, what have you seen are some of the fallacies that prevent executives in sharing the value that they bring for the compensation they deserve. Sure, I think the biggest thing is fear of loss, followed by a healthy dose of imposter syndrome that haunts us all. Even the most confident people have a little bit of that, like what if I'm not worth that?

8:31 And it holds you back. You don't know how other people are going to value you. You might know how you value yourself, but you realize if you're an executive, you have some life experience and you've been through this, and you realize that what you think of yourself is very important. But what other people, especially people with the power to hold things back from you, what they think is also really important. And since you can't read their mind, it's a high stakes game. So I think it's fear of loss more than anything. But here's something that people believe that isn't really true in my experience. Now, keep in mind that I've been the head of global recruiting for multiple Fortune five hundred companies now and I was exclusively responsible for executive recruitment, pay negotiation, onboarding and all that.

9:30 During all of that time, the senior most roles in the company. I was negotiating as the tip of the spear for the company. Most people think that the offer is just going to be yanked away. I've seen that happen before, and it does happen, but only in a couple of situations. And once you understand that, and you understand that pay negotiation does not have to be a high stakes game of chicken like most people think it is. It doesn't have to be confrontational, it doesn't have to be aggravating. In fact, it should be a very collaborative conversation that people. Sometimes people change their whole personality when it comes time to negotiate, and that's usually the thing, you know, when I've been the negotiator where I've had to call the candidate and say, you know, we've had a change of mind. Here, we're going in a different direction. Thanks, but no thanks, what happens Vivia, if I can take a little rabbit trail here for a minute, please, People have it in their mind that they have to be aggressive to negotiate, or that they have to stand that.

10:52 We are told constantly stand up for yourself, know what you are worth, and insist upon that. And pay negotiation is a different kind of negotiation even if you're doing multimillion dollar deals with other people's money, when it comes to your own money, people don't know how to do that because they haven't done it much in their life. And an executive might have eight or nine times to do that in their entire career. So almost everyone is a beginner and facing off against somebody like me. But if people believe that they need to be aggressive or overly assertive or forceful in the negotiation, but that's not who they were in the interview process. This is what haunts people at this process. Then at this point in the process, so they'll go change their personality when it comes time to talk about money. And then the manager and I will get together and compare notes about this, and hiring manager starts to get cold feet because the person they thought they were hiring is not the person that's showing up now, and they start second guessing did I get to know them? Is this about to be a hiring mistake? What if they act this way in front of my client, or what if they act this

12:22 way in front of my boss? You get the offer. You get the offer because they like who you are. They feel like you're going to do the job. And they feel like you'll fit and you won't be a high risk situation for the hiring manager. Now you're a different person, and now the risk of hiring you just goes way up. But I will tell you this, folks that are listening, the number of times that I've had to rescind an offer in the thousands and thousands of offers I've extended, I could probably count on one hand. It's a rare situation. It does not happen often. Now, it can happen if you get to a negotiating impasse, which is a company wants to pay you twenty percent less than you want to make at a minimum. You get to that spot where you realize there's just not a match here. That's not the same thing. So yeah, there's a lot of misunderstandings that lead to this issue.

13:33 The biggest one is that huge fear that the offer is going to be rescinded or yanked away at the finish line. You just have to know how to do this right, and then you don't have to have that fear anymore. Absolutely, And because what happens is even while going through interview process and you mentioned that for you, it was twenty four rounds of behavioral question and behavioral interviews, and recently one of my executives she did get the job, but it was in the c suite and they had a psychologist as one of the panels. So it makes sense.

14:16 You know, you want to protect your culture, you want to bring in the right person. So it can be very heroic experience just going through the interview and tell us how can people lose that fear? What are some of let's begin with what are some of the not to do things where that fear of the employer potential employer as sending their offer can happen. I think that not to do things are become someone that you're not, and that applies to to the psychologist's interview that you just mentioned. Usually that's paired with an assessment.

14:58 There will be some sort of executive of assessment, maybe a corn fairy assessment or who knows what. There are hundreds of them out there, and oftentimes for these high stakes jobs, the c suite positions where a hiring mistake would be an absolute disaster that moves the stock price. They're looking to reduce the risk anyway they can, and this is one of the ways that companies often do that for senior jobs, so they'll have you do the assessment, and then they'll have a psychologist either observe or spend an hour or longer with you, digging into how you answered these questions. So being yourself, I think is very important for several reasons. I know that most people want to get the job and they think, Wow, I've just got to ace this interview. I have to I have to perform. Don't try to be somebody or not during the interview. That's foreign ground. You're not as good at that as you are at being yourself. Plus, do you want them to hire somebody they think you are? Do they want? Do you want them to hire you? It's way lower risk and more enjoyable to get the job because they want you instead of the person you're pretending to be. So that's really really important to be authentically you during the process, especially when you're taking an assessment.

16:28 If your personality doesn't match up with this job, it means you're going to have to be someone you're not all day long, and that's really hard to do. It's exhausting. So that's my advice, don't do that. Very powerful advice because a lot of people forget that there are little things that give you away. You may think that you're putting on that mask, but it could be that tone of voice, it could just be the pacing off words. It could be a body language, it could be your feet. There's so many different things. It's the words that you use. So staying authentic in that really makes sense. And you have coined salary framework for negotiation.

17:17 Can you walk us through that? Yeah? So I built something called the salary Coach method. It lines up with my company and my negotiating philosophy, which is it's different from regular negotiation. I think you could read lots of books on negotiation, you could pick up some tips and techniques, but the salary Coach method talks you through how to negotiate pay from end to end. And most people think that the negotiation starts when you have an offer on the table, But I think that's a mistake to think that the pay discussions begin in the very first call. So gibe, if you applied for a role or or a search firm contacts you, somebody's going to call you and one of the very first questions out of their mouth is what is your pay expectation or what's your you know, what is your salary requirement?

18:12 Or how much money do you need to make? Or how much money are you making? And these are all there, they're all qualification in screening questions, and so I teach people how to get through that without limiting their negotiating power and keeping that power on their side of the table instead of giving it all away immediately to the screener. There's specific ways you should be answering these questions early on, and then I teach people how to build their value during the interview process, so that as people are formulating the offer before it's even extended to you, they're imagining all of the expensive problems you're going to solve, and if you're expensive or you might be expensive, they're starting to justify the cost. And speaking as an insider, there's an important thing that happens before you ever get an offer, and that's an offer approval process. In almost every company, there's going to be people who didn't meet you involved in deciding how much they're going to offer you. It's the boss's boss, it's the board of directors, it's who knows who right. There are other people. There's the compensation team.

19:33 There's a lot of folks that get a lot of cooks in the kitchen here, and so if the offer is just a little bit outlandish, that hiring manager is going to have to justify that and say, I want to hire Divya and I want to pay her this much because she can do a B and C and that's really impactful for our business and everybody else who didn't meet Who's going to push back and say, yeah, but we have these four other people who are making less money and adjacent functions. What about them? And there's a back and forth that happens internally. So yeah, it's important to get that right and to build into that process. Yeah, and then there's negotiating the offer itself without risk. So losing the risk or limiting the risk is a huge part of the salary coach method.

20:28 And that sounds really powerful. So let's say, for someone who's listening right now, what are some of the tips at each stage that they could apply today. Great, we'll give you some meat on the bone here, folks, so hopefully this will be fun to listen to. A big general tip is when somebody calls you for your early in the process and people ask you that how much money do you need to make? What your pay expectation. Big tip is to use a range at that step. Do not answer with a no. Don't say I need a salary of at least five hundred thousand, or I need a one point two million dollar package, or I need a two hundred and fifty thousand dollars package. Most people, when I say most, it's ninety five percent plus, answer that question with a number, and that's a mistake. So you answer with a range and that allows you to move up in your range as you move through the process.

21:34 You're not stuck with a number if you give a number. If you said I need at least five hundred thousand, someone like me will put I can get Divya for five hundred thousand on your resume somewhere, And that's almost always what the offer looks like at the end if they want to select you. Sometimes it's even lower, but they almost never will go above that unless they have to negotiate a little bit. But it's difficult to come off a number once you give them one. Another big piece of advice here is do not accept the offer immediately when it comes everyone's worn out and exhausted by the job search and the interview process, just like I was a capital one. When the offer comes, it's incredibly relieving, and there's this psychological feeling that you need to.

22:30 You. It's so attractive to just dismiss all this uncertainty in your life, and now you have the opportunity. Just if I just say yes right now, I can start the celebration and I don't have to endure this uncertainty one moment longer. And people like me are very good at giving you that off ramp in a way that feels emotionally good. We don't want negotiation. We want to head that up off and create a certain outcome for ourselves, and that means getting you too yes immediately is the ideal outcome for me. If I'm on the other side of the table, you do not have to say yes immediately, and that's a huge mistake most people make. One of my clients almost said yes immediately. He called me and said, I've been through this two month process, I just got an offer. I think it's good enough. I think I'm just going to say yes. And I said to him, hold up for a second, send me the written offer.

23:39 Let's take a look at it together. We'll build a strategy together that's very low risk, and I'll show you how this is done. And he did that, and we ended up enriching his package by six hundred and thirteen thousand dollars. It was a combination of equity and pay increase and increase bonus target and a six figure signing bonus that you didn't think about, and a bunch of other things like that. And that is so powerful taking that pause, taking that moment, and sitting on it. So a couple of other questions come to my mind. As to so many times. What happens is that a lot of companies, especially in the past couple of years, what they've been doing is they are doing away with middle management and also with some of the executives. And also the number of reports that will be reporting into from VP level to even higher is increasing. A lot of flattening is happening. So a lot of turbulence because of AI and the urgency to bring in AI and get on the bandwagon is going on.

24:55 So amongst all of this, there is uncertainty. And let's say if there's an executive who has been laid off, and of course their stress hormones are the highest. A load, of course, might be one of the tip that they would note that they could reduce that risk no salary negotion and not just accepting the first offer they get. Okay, So my advice to if I had a client who was in this situation, and I have many, I'd say over half of my clients are in between. The other half are looking strategically. But the half that are in between have been affected by a merger, some sort of downsizing or adjustment in the company, and now they find themselves out and they're for those folks. And if you're listening and you're in that category, it's a very scary place to be, and that fear activates, and that fear pushes you into the corner and wants you to take the first offer just so that this uncertainty goes away.

26:11 And it's right to be afraid in this situation because a lot of these positions are filled through executive search. Most people know this because you've been a hiring manager. On the other side, when you're employed, you might call corn Ferry or Hydrogen Struggles or one of these big agencies and ask them to fill that person that's going to report to you. Those companies charge a lot of money, and sales pitch is always we're going to find people that you can't find on your own, and that means employed people that are working for your competition. So if you're unemployed, it's like you're radioactive to these search agencies.

26:51 They don't want to include you in their slate, or they'll only include a very small number of people like this because how can they justify a six figure fee otherwise, So you start to feel like, oh my gosh, I'm desperate. I have to land something and then I'll be in a position of strength to negotiate well. So when my clients are in this situation, what I almost always advise them to do is start an interim consulting business so that they're not unemployed, they have something going on, and you don't even have to have clients. You just have to seem like you've got them, and you stand up a consulting business. You start reaching out, and sometimes though, those little consulting gigs turn into job offers because now they're working with you, they see how well you fit with their team, and the risk of bringing you in is lower than the risk of hiring somebody just off the street. So doing a consulting business solves a lot of problems. And if you start to get a little income through this, you might discover it's a new plan a or makes you feel less financially out swinging in the wind. If you've got some money coming in from consulting, you're not draining your savings account selling your assets just to make the mortgage payment three month, which increases the fear absolutely.

28:20 And that's very powerful advice because that's some of the things I have some of my clients do that is doing fractional work because it is hard. Like you know, once you take on a even a part time gig, it drain your energy and it takes you away from going and looking for the job of your dream or the job that will pay you for what you're worth. And that absolutely then so many times also what happens is going back to this situation where it can be because of merger, because of AI and there are multiple reasons why companies downsize. What happens is that they may accept an offer which is at lore just for having that security in their lives, and then they're in the process of having multiple interviews excuse me, and now they have signed up, they've accepted the offer, and now here comes the offer is much higher. So if you had a client like that, what would you tell them?

29:37 Okay, so the scenario is they've just accepted another offer. They haven't started yet, is that right? And then then this other offer finally comes in and it's much better. So I would tell them reach out to the company that you accepted the offer with, talk to your direct boss, and say something that I was not anticipating just happened, and I've got an offer that I just can't turn down. I wasn't expecting this. I went off the table when I accepted this offer with you. I was all in, ready to go, and I'm still excited about it, by the way, but this other thing kind of came out of nowhere. I was in an active job search, and here it is. I feel that I must accept this other offer. So let's work together to figure out how we unwind from this and in a way that doesn't embarrass you and doesn't create a problem on your side.

30:45 And I think that's the sensitive way of doing it. Keep in mind that a company that sees a better option will cut ties with you very quickly, and the loyalty that you to be toward employees and senior executives does not exist anymore used to and there are people like I'm sixty years old that I can remember a time when companies were a little bit more loyal than the are today. But that has just gone away. The average executive tenure is going to be a couple of years now, two or three years is typical. There's a lot of churn, and so looking out for yourself might feel icky in this situation, but there is an ethical way of unwinding from a commitment that you made. You're not trapped, you're not stuck, and you can preserve that relationship.

31:46 You can do that without burning the bridge. If you are cautious, you have a coach in your corner. It's very helpful. Somebody like you can help them to find the right words. And you know, somebody like me, we do this all the time. Yeah, having that integrity and not skirting the issue. Being direct and one thing that you brought up is so essential. Two things actually not feeling icky about it because companies, as you mentioned, you know, there's no longer that loyalty towards employees and employees are also getting in that mindset of not having that loyalty for the companies, and then second recognizing that you would have worked with your boss or whoever was on the other side who made all the deal because you went through the negotiation. They jump through hoops, especially if it is for some executive that they really wanted to bring on. So not boning the bridges and keeping that in mind can go definitely long ways.

32:50 So you were in you're kind of backtracking now rewining a little bit before you decided to step into becoming salary coach. What was it that made you realize that you could help executives get ten to twenty percent more in compensation? Good question, Well, I was maybe I think it started salary coach about five years ago, Diva, and it was right. It was during the pandemic when the FED started to raise interest rates as we started to have an inflation spiral, and I've been through so many hiring slowdowns being the head of recruiting. I've seen this, I've heard this record play before, and I knew that as soon as the FED started raising interst rates, it was going to be a giant wet blanket on the hiring market, that jobs would go on hold, the companies would step back and reevaluate their recruiting and growth plans, and that they would probably hunker down for a while. And I didn't know if it was going to be a year or two.

34:00 My primary consulting business at that time was recruiting transformations, and that's where I helped companies to fix their broken recruiting process. And people will hire me as long as they're aggressively recruiting, and they have problems that are holding them back from their recruiting goals. It's too slow, it costs too much. You know. These are the kind of things. Now. I thought perhaps this business would encounter a slow period, and I started thinking, well, what is it that I'm good at that I can do? And I realized I'd been helping friends and family to negotiate their pay for years and years, ever since I can remember. I've had a knack for this, and I was the guy on the inside that trained all the other recruiters on how to negotiate. I just had this intuitive feel for how it was supposed to work. And so I went to LinkedIn and I found some people that I didn't know I was curious to see could I help ten people that I didn't know for free to get more money in negotiating their pay, and I made that offer. I just did a little pilot test to see what might work, and ten out of ten of them had a gain.

35:18 The lowest one was like nine thousand dollars and the highest one was fifty four thousand dollars, and it was These were all like mid career people, not executives at the time, and that showed me that I had something highly valuable to offer the world that nobody else was offering. There are a handful of people that do this as part of their career coaching practice, nobody who's a deep expert in this area. So I wrote, I wrote the book Actor Wage, I built the salary Coach method and again to refine that and very quickly became one of the known experts in the field of pay negotiation. And I found out that I really love actually doing Compared to recruiting transformations where I'm helping a company, now I'm helping a family. It just feels different, it feels better.

36:21 I'm I'm more spiritually and emotionally aligned with this work. And it's been It was a surprising shift in career, but I just love this and I think living in and doing something that you really are aligned with in so many ways, like it just feels magical and I'm grateful to be in this spot now. Well, I'm very happy for you because I'm sure, as you mentioned, you started out with the pilot and now you're helping people get more compensation for the value that they bring to the table. And that's powerful and just that one on one connection can be so meaningful and rewarding.

37:10 So share with us where can people connect with you? And if they wanted to figure out how to work with you, can they find your book anything else you'd like to share with your audience. Thank you if you appreciate that opportunity to plug. So Act Your Wage is available on Amazon in kindle and softcover formats, so that's a good place to start if you're looking to build this skill. And I think pay negotiation is a skill that, once learned, will pay you every single day for the rest of your career. And it doesn't matter if you're just starting or if you're a senior person. Every time you change jobs, this is going to affect your lifetime earnings. So it's worth investing in.

37:57 The book is a great place to start. If people want to talk to me personally, they're in a situation, or they have questions, they can hit me at John at salary dot coach. John at salary dot coach. That's my direct email, and Liz hit me up. I answer all the questions that come in that way. Well. Fantastic. Thank you for sharing your wisdom because there's so many people out right there that are struggling and listening to this powerful message and as you are helping them take that fear out of the process. That is huge.

38:39 Is there any last minute pots that you'd like to share. Yes, one tip that I missed that I just want to throw in there as a bonus tip. So if you hung out this long and in the broadcast, you're going to get something that the other people that hung up five minutes ago are not going to get, and that is cultivate some sense of competition for you when you're in the interview process and when you're in just when you're in the selection process, help them to feel like other people are also pursuing you. That is so important to build that as part of the leverage of getting more money. Hiring managers believe that someone with no options who is desperate might be desperate for our reason.

39:28 Maybe there's some flaw in this person that we haven't noticed yet, and it can actually derail your selection. But if they are asking you like how much money do you need to make? What your pay expectation, and your response is something like, well, I'm in an active job search and the range that I'm discussing with other companies for similar roles is between A and B. You've just carefully dropped this idea that you're in discussions with other companies and other companies are interested in you, and that magnifies your value more than almost any other thing. You can't be obnoxious about that. But threading, you know, dropping those breadcrumbs all along the way, builds this impression of you that you are in demand, that other people see value in you, and there's no secret gotcha waiting to be discovered somewhere.

40:32 M definitely an excellent tip. Thank you John for joining us. Enjoyed our conversation. Thank you, Tivia, I had a blast. This was fun, absolutely, and thank you wonderful audience, because without you the show would not be possible. You are the life and blood of our show and our family, so reach out to us like you always do, and I'm so thankful, thank you, thank you, thank you for all of those who have been following me so loyally. And I know like we talk about that loyalties out there, but I just want to share that I love you all and for you've been with me for so many years and you reach out and share, so please continue doing it. And I want to give you a shout out and thank you on for being the tech genius.

41:25 So be well and take care untilng's time. Thank you for being part of Beyond Confidence with your host divv Park, we hope you have learned more about how to start living the life you want. Each week on Beyond Confidence, you hear stories of real people who've experienced growth by overcoming their fears and building meaningful relationships. During Beyond Confidence, Vapark shares what happened to her when she stepped out of her comfort zone to work directly with people across the globe. She not only coaches people how to form HERD connections, but also transform relationships to mutually beneficial partnerships as they strive to live the life they want. If you are ready to live the life you want and leverage your strengths. Learn more at www dotwpark dot com and you can connect with wats contact at wpark dot com. We look forward to you joining us next week