Job-Hunting? Better Price Yourself Like a House

As a job-seeker, you know that you're going to have to talk about money at some point. That doesn't mean you have to spill your guts whenever somebody asks you a question about your current or past salaries.

It's tacky as hell and completely unethical to demand a job-seeker's private salary information. It's the mark of a bad recruiter, whether it's a company recruiter or a third-party headhunter who works for an outside firm or for himself.

You don't have to give up your salary information, not only because it's personal information but also because it's irrelevant. What someone is paying you right now or what they paid you at your last job has nothing to do with what you're worth to a new employer.

You could be worth less. You could be worth more. It depends on a lot of factors. Recruiters ask for your salary information because it gives the employer negotiating leverage over you, and the honest recruiters who wrote to us about this issue said that right up front.

"Yes, when we have a candidate's salary history, of course there's power in the negotiation," said one recruiter, Mary Ellen, in an email message she sent to our office, "and that's what my clients pay me to get for them."

You don't have to give up your salary information when you're job-hunting (not even to automated recruiting systems, as I explain in this story) but you do need to have a salary target. You have to know what your talents are worth to various kinds of employers. At Human Workplace we say "Price yourself like a house."

You have to know your market. In the new-millennium workplace we are all living in now, you can't stay silent throughout the interview process and expect to be delighted with the salary offer you get. In the old days we were taught "The person who gives up a number first, loses."

That's not good advice anymore. If you keep your mouth shut through three or four interviews and wait for a job offer to start negotiating your salary, get ready to be disappointed! You're likely to get a lowball offer. Who could blame your employer in that case? After all, you didn't tell them what you were expecting to see in an offer!

You have to know what your background is worth and you have to talk about it during the interview process. You can use Salary and Payscale to do some compensation research, but that is just scraping the surface.

Those sites will tell you what employers are paying people in similar job titles to yours, on average, in your region. That's a good starting point, but you need to do more work than that!

A far better yardstick for a job-seeker's salary-target-setting is to look at the cost of the Business Pain you relieve in your work. Every business has pain. If they didn't have any pain, they wouldn't be hiring. They'd save their money. The pain costs more than your salary will cost -- many times more, in some cases.

You have to think like a business owner now, and make some assumptions about what your favorite brand of Business Pain is costing your employer right up until the minute you come on board to relieve it. You can't rest on the information "Marketing people like me get paid about sixty thousand dollars in this town." So what?

That's not necessarily relevant. If you bring much more to the table in tangible value than other people with similar experience to yours do, or people with similar job titles, then you can slip the bonds of a job title and price yourself according to the results you know you can produce.

You just have to be able to get your future boss to see things the way you do -- and you'll begin that sales process with your Human-Voiced Resume and a Pain Letter written just for that one manager, and sent through the mail.

You have to know your salary target and you have to speak it.

I don't blame you at all if a headhunter calls you and you say "What's the salary range for this job?" and the headhunter says "What's your current salary?" and you say "I'm not sure you heard me just now - I asked you what the salary range is?" and the headhunter says "I need to know your current salary" and you say "What's that? There must be static on the line" just as you hang up the phone.

You don't have time to waste with people who want to start a relationship by bullying you.

Still, you are going to go on job interviews, with or without recruiters in the mix, and you're going to have to bring up the salary topic eventually.

I recommend that you do it before your second interview. Someone wlll call you or write to you and invite you to the second interview:

SALLY, a COMPANY RECRUITER: Hi Adam! I wanted to let you know that our team really enjoyed meeting you last week, and they'd like you to come back next week - Thursday, if possible - and meet a few more people.

YOU: That sounds great Sally -- the idea of a second interview, that is. I have to check on whether or not Thursday will work. Say, I have a question for you. Are you the right person to talk about compensation with? I want to make sure we're in the same ballpark, so that none of us wastes our time on a second interview if we aren't. Do you have the salary range for this position?

SALLY: Um, what are you earning now?

YOU: I'm focusing on jobs in the $60-$70K range.

SALLY: Can you tell me your current salary?

YOU: Actually Sally, I asked for the salary range and you asked me for my current salary. I gave you my salary target, so it's your turn! What is the salary range for the job?

SALLY: I don't know. You can talk to Paula about it when you come back next week.

YOU: If we're not in the same salary ballpark, it wouldn't make sense for me to come back and meet more people. Can you please have Paula call me?

Sally the recruiter said they loved you. If Paula doesn't call you, move on! You already volunteered valuable information to Sally. If you think that Adam in the example above took too wimpy an approach, you can try it this way:

SALLY, a COMPANY RECRUITER: Hi Siobhan! I wanted to let you know that our team really enjoyed meeting you last week, and they'd like you to come back next week - Thursday, if possible - and meet a few more people.

YOU: That sounds great Sally -- the idea of a second interview, that is. I have to check on whether or not Thursday will work. Say, I have a question for you. Are you the right person to talk about compensation with? I want to make sure we're in the same ballpark, so that none of us wastes our time on a second interview if we aren't. Do you have the salary range for this position?

SALLY: What did you earn at your last job, Siobhan?

YOU: Wow -- there's a non sequitur. I was asking you about the salary range for the position. Do you know what that is?

SALLY: No -- you can talk to Paula about that when you're here next week.

YOU: I would hate to book Paula's time or my time without knowing in advance that we're in the same compensation ballpark. Can you ask Paula to call me?

Let's say Paula calls you the same day. Paula says "Our salary range is pretty open. What is your salary target?" Now you'll throw out that $60-70K range. Let Paula react to it.

Maybe (I doubt it, but maybe) she was planning to pay someone more than that in her new job. If that's the case, you'll hear her excitement in her voice.

"Okay, that will work! Let's get together right away."

Does that mean you're stuck? You have no way of knowing what Paula's budget is, and in our experience, close to a hundred percent of job-seekers who took their chances and waited for the offer to learn about the employer's target salary range were disappointed.

You are a business person -- it's appropriate and responsible to talk about money! You don't have to wait for an offer to open that conversation, and I don't want you to.

Let's say you threw out the $60-$70K number but as you get closer to the job-offer stage, you can see that the job is much bigger than what you had thought it was.

It's up to you to bring up salary again. You'll call Paula, your hiring manager, on the phone.

PAULA: Paula Jones!

YOU: Hi Paula! It's Siobhan O'Grady. How are you?

PAULA: Really good, Siobhan! What's up?

YOU: I wanted to touch base with you on a couple of things. I learned that Jack Smith, who's one of my references, is out of the country and unreachable. I wanted to let you know before you start trying to reach him...

PAULA: Thanks! I got his voicemail over the weekend but now I know not to bother. That's okay. I still have three other people I can call. It's not that I doubt you. I love talking to people, and we gain a lot through the reference-checking process.

YOU: It's fine. The other thing is that I wanted to check in with you on salary. We talked about a range of sixty to seventy kay, and I didn't know how firmly I might have planted that seed in your mind.

PAULA: I don't know -- pretty firmly, I guess. That's the range I've been working with.

YOU: It's the perfect range for the original job we talked about, the social media marketing job. Since then in our conversations, we've expanded the role a lot. I'm excited about it, but it's not a sixty to seventy kay job anymore, and as much as I'd love to work with you and your team, I wanted to let you know that.

PAULA: When someone gives me a salary target, I take it seriously.

YOU: So do I. I gave you that information based on what was printed in your job ad, and of course, we're many miles away from that role description at this point.

PAULA: What kind of gap are we talking about?

YOU: Probably twelve thousand dollars.

PAULA: Should we get to brass tacks? Twelve thousand dollars over the bottom of your $60-70K range is seventy-two thousand, and I could do that. Eighty-two thousand I couldn't do.

YOU: We can talk brass tacks if you want. I need seventy-five thousand minimum.

PAULA: Five thousand over your original target range.

YOU: Yes. Paula, you know that it's a good deal for the level of responsibility I'm going to have in the job.

PAULA: Let me think about it. Will we see you next Friday - that's what Sally told me?

YOU: Well, I am scheduled to come in and meet you then, but of course we need to work the numbers piece out first.

PAULA: Good, then that's my deadline.

YOU: You know what, let's make Wednesday the deadline -- if you're on the fence to the degree that this would be a really monumental decision for you, it would be silly to go forward.

PAULA: Wednesday, then.

Most of us are conflict-averse, but as a job-seeker you're going to grow new muscles! You're going to learn to step into conversations about money, among other wonderful new muscles you'll grow. Start by knowing your salary target. That's up to you, not anybody else! You're taking charge of your own career. Good for you!

Watch and Listen as Liz and Molly describe Human Workplace Four-Week Virtual Courses starting Saturday, April 4, 2015!