The first step to becoming a skillful negotiator is awareness of one’s value to any potential employer. This was discussed in the lead of our current editorial series on negotiating job offers.
Logically, there must be a next step. What can you do once you have a clear idea of your worth?
SET YOUR EXPECTATIONS.
Logically, knowing what you’re worth means that you know what you deserve. But it is easy to make the mistake of believing that your value is higher than what your actual selling points will show. Having expectations that are much higher than what a potential employer is willing to give for your qualifications can lead to disagreement.
At the same time, you want to protect yourself from being offered a lower deal than you deserve. But without relevant information, there’s no way to know for sure whether or not the company is offering you a bad deal. How do you get rid of this uncertainty?
The next step: from knowing what you’re worth, move onto knowing what kind of job offer you should be expecting from a potential employer.
The average career-seeker who has just started learning this process might not have enough information to set reliable expectations. Therefore, research and consultation with colleagues will help identify the existing industry-wide and position-specific benchmarks. Be sure to pay close attention to how other professionals obtain this information, so that it will be more directly accessible in the future.
Once that information has been organized, a career-seeker must set the absolute minimum they will accept. This applies not only to the net salary, but also the entire compensation and benefits package, as well as the actual working conditions such as the schedule and workload. Are you willing to work from 8:00 AM to 6:30 PM five days a week, or do you prefer working only eight hours even if it means working up to Saturday? What kind of healthcare benefits do you expect?
All in all, this step should help you build the criteria for accepting or declining a job offer. The best part is, your criteria will be based on widely-accepted standards for the industry you will be joining and the position you will be taking.
These should all help you in the next step, which will be discussed next week. Keep tuning into this topic for more tips on negotiating job offers!