Seasoned recruiter and salary negotiation coach John Gates reveals insider secrets to help you master salary negotiations and land your dream job. John, the best-selling author of Act Your Wage and founder of Recruiting Transformations, shares his journey through the ups and downs of the recruiting world, including multiple layoffs and the challenges of navigating corporate ladders. He provides invaluable insights into the emotional side of hiring, revealing how to connect with hiring managers, understand their fears, and ultimately become the candidate they cannot resist. Get ready to ditch the fear and unlock your earning potential!

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John Gates – Act Your Wage: The Secrets To Salary Negotiations

Welcome to the show. We’re going to be diving deep into the art of salary negotiation with John Gates. John is a best-selling author of the book Act Your Wage. He is a former head of recruiting at some of the world’s top companies out there. He’s a leader of Salary.Coach, which is a coaching platform, and then also Recruiting Transformations. He’s working on both sides of the equation, which we’re going to dive into here in the discussion.

John brings a wealth of knowledge to this crucial topic, especially at this time when people are looking for work. It’s a difficult market out there. In John’s book, Act Your Wage, he has guided countless professionals to negotiate their wages in a substantial way, sometimes over $20,000 in compensation or more. Depending on your level, that can be extremely meaningful for those higher levels. It can be about a 10% to 20% substantial increase in new salaries coming in.

John is not just an author but he’s a beacon for those who are looking to understand the nuances of negotiation within the corporate landscape and working with recruiters. In this episode, he’s going to shed light on why salary discussions remain taboo and what we can do to change that and empower individuals to assert more of their negotiation powers at the onset. Let’s prepare to transform your approach to salary negotiations to the topic Act Your Wage with the expertise of John Gates.

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Welcome, John.

Thanks. It’s great to be here.

John’s Passion For Salary Negotiations And Recruiting Reform

First, as we start out these discussions, I’d love to dive into a little bit of your history and your passion for helping individuals negotiate their wages. Also, let’s jump on the other side of the table, too, as a reformer of recruiting teams. Let’s start with a little bit of your background.

Hopefully, it won’t be too long of a story because I’ve been recruiting for over 30 years. I got started in the temporary service agency world. They hired me because I looked good in a suit, I could speak Spanish, and I had a degree. That was my start in recruiting. Most recruiters fall into the world of recruiting instead of seeking it as a career. That’s what happened to me.

Most recruiters fall into the world of recruiting instead of seeking it as a career. Share on X

In the first five years of my career when I worked for those agencies, it was starvation wages. I was making $16,000 a year working at that level. Finally, I got a chance to be a corporate technical recruiter for one of my clients. That was a company in suburban Portland, Oregon. I started working there and finally, I started having more money. That was really great and I was enjoying it so much.

Three years into that journey, the marketing department made a big mistake. They brought a whole generation of products in that were a mismatch for the market. The company I had been recruiting for decided it was time to get smaller by a significant margin. This is something that career recruiters face all the time. You’re responsible for making a company bigger and to feed that growth curve. As soon as a company decides that it’s time to get smaller, recruiters and those in learning and development and other not-keep-the-lights-on functions are easy targets for reduction.

Throughout my career, I’ve been laid off four different times because of these reasons. That’s what happened when I was working there at Tektronix in Portland, Oregon. I got the layoff notice and I bought my 1st house 6 months earlier. I was terrified. When you get laid off, you might get a severance plan. This particular one was very skinny because I’d only been there for three years. I had 2 infant sons, 1 toddler and 1 newborn. I was terrified. I didn’t know what was going to happen. The economy was starting to get a little sluggish.

Common Challenges In Recruiting And How To Overcome Them

I started going out to the market and ended up getting a chance to interview at Capital One in Richmond, Virginia, which is about as far away from Oregon as you can get. I took the interview, but before that though, I was getting all these screening calls from people like me. They would call me and say, “John, what’s the pay requirement here? How much do we need to pay you to get you to move to Louisiana, Chicago, or some other place like that?” I was shocked because I had been asking those questions for years, but then I was getting those questions and I was completely unprepared to answer them. I could ask them but I couldn’t answer them.

I kept painting myself into a corner because I wanted to interview. I kept lowballing myself. I was desperate. I know what it feels like to be in that place. When you’re in between and you’re scared, our tendency is to lowball ourselves. One of the things I do as a pain negotiation coach is helping people to navigate that minefield so they can avoid that mistake. I interviewed with Capital One, and Capital One has the most difficult selection process I have ever seen. I learned a lot working there. That’s a spoiler. I got picked. I got selected.

There, you have to pass 23 different behavioral competencies in interviews. If you fail even one of those, you don’t get an offer. There were three different assessments that I had to take for written tests. If you fail the cut score on any one of those, you’re not getting an offer. I had to do a business case interview, which is a whiteboard exercise with math calculations and recommending a business decision. If you fail that, you’re not getting an offer.

After all that whole day of onsite grilling, I’m in the interview room and wiping the sweat and blood off of myself, and in comes the recruiter that I’ve been working with. His name was Chip. Chip comes in, sits across from me, and says, “John, I’m going to level with you here. I’ve interviewed over twenty people for this job. You and one other person are the only ones who’ve passed the process and he withdrew. What’s it going to take to get you to say yes? I really want to close this out and tell the manager that you’re on board and you’re moving from Oregon to Virginia. What’s it going to take?”

For the first time in my life, I felt this sense of leverage that I’d never experienced before as a candidate. I was very unprepared to handle that as well. I told them, “I need more salary. How about this? I want a different incentive plan. Can we upgrade that? Can I get a better relocation plan? I bought a house and I’m worried about selling it. How about a signing bonus?” I got all of the above.

I spent the next three and a half years working at Capital One wondering how much I left on the table because they said yes so fast. It ate at me. I’d been laid off and I was keen to not get laid off again. I wanted to justify my value. I started tracking how much my candidates were leaving on the table. I would get an offer approved, like, “You can offer up to $135,000 on this. You’ve got a $10,000 signing bonus if you need it.” If I closed that at $128,000 and I could go as high as $135,000, I saved $7,000 in salary. If I didn’t need the signing bonus, I saved $10,000 in signing bonus. I set a goal as a recruiter to cover my annual salary every month with salary negotiation savings.

I became the internal expert on pay negotiation because that reputation started to filter around in the company and I started training recruiters. Over the course of my career, I have trained hundreds of recruiters on how to negotiate pay with candidates on behalf of companies. As I became the head of recruiting for big functions, I would set those goals after training to cover the entire recruiting department’s annual budget in pay negotiation savings so that we could say, “We’re not just a cost center. We’re creating some financial value here because of our expertise.” It was also a good way to argue that recruiters should be negotiating pay, not hiring managers. Something that I always try to bring is subject matter expertise to the recruiting team.

Eventually, I went on to learn all the process rigor that I learned at Capital One. It was the foundation of my recruiting process redesign work. Every time I went from company to company to be the new recruiting leader, it was always to fix a broken function. I was the mechanic. I was the guy who was going to come in and make things faster, make things cheaper, make things better, improve the candidate experience, and improve the internal hiring manager experience. There were always problems and they needed a fixer. I was that person. I developed a reputation in the industry for being someone who could reverse engineer all of the problems and chart the path forward.

In 2016, I started Recruiting Transformations to do this for companies because by then, I’d been laid off four times. I was getting tired of that. I wanted to do all of this process-fixing without the concerns about being laid off and things like that because that was my favorite part of being a recruiting leader. I provide interim recruiting leadership. I recruit the next person who’s coming in and fix recruiting problems that are persistent.

A couple of years ago, I thought, “Since I’ve been helping people informally with their pay negotiation for a number of years, I wonder if I could help people that I had never met?” I’d always helped the inner circle. As HR people, we do that. Our friends, our family, and our closest people are on a job hunt and we help them with their resume or help them get through. I’d been doing that for years on pay negotiation and started to notice I was helping people to get a lot of extra money safely without putting that offer at risk.

A few years ago, I ran a pilot on LinkedIn. I reached out to salaried people who were in a job hunt, people that I didn’t know, and said, “How about this? I want to help you for free. Let’s see if we can work together to improve your pay package.” In every single case, I was getting people more money and teaching them how to avoid the big risk points in pay negotiation. I thought, “Maybe I have a business here.” That’s when I launched Salary.Coach. I had been doing that ever since as a side gig but it’s growing to the point where it might even become the primary thing.

There’s a lot of demand and also a lot of really bad advice that’s out there in the world on this front. I’m very sensitive to the emotional needs of people who are in between. Most people are afraid, and that’s why they end up leaving money on the table. When they’re armed with knowledge and how to do that, some of that fear dissolves and then it becomes fairly easy. These are skills anyone can learn. It serves you throughout your career every time you change jobs.

When you are armed with knowledge, fear dissolves and work become easier. These are skills anyone can learn, and they serve you throughout your career every time you change jobs. Share on X

We do have a question online. What are the most common problems or challenges that you see in recruiting, and how do you address them?

There are several. Time to fill is probably the most common problem where a chief HR officer is under fire in those executive meetings because it’s taking too long to fill positions. When a company’s growing and they’re trying to take advantage of a window of growth opportunity, let’s say, “If we can only grow our sales function or engineering function fast enough, we could take advantage of this market situation or the conditions that we’re in.” The longer it takes to staff a function that needs to grow into an opportunity like that, the more costly it is. All these profit centers of the business are really leaning on the chief HR officer to fix this problem. A lot of recruiting teams don’t know how to fix the problem. They’re too close to the problem. That’s the number one most common issue.

Another one is that sometimes, the recruiting team has lost the trust of their customers in some way, shape, or form. They are not going too slow. Maybe they’re too expensive or they’ve delivered pipelines of candidates that are way off target. The hiring manager thinks, “I’m not sure this team is up to the task so I’m going to go around them and contract with a third-party search agency.” The costs are beginning to explode because of that. These teams are very rescuable. They’re not lost causes. They need to know how to do the job in a way that’s going to reinforce and rebuild trust. Hopefully, that answers that question.

Thanks. You were talking about a lot of the complexities and challenges of recruiting teams. My hat goes off to them because you’re right. During the busy times, they’re hiring and bringing in important talent and critical talents to the organization. As soon as the market turns, you’re right. They’re the first ones that go. They’re like, “If we’re not hiring next year or we’re not hiring through the next six months, then we don’t need a recruiting team.” Those professionals go out into the marketplace where the market has been the driest for years.

We’ve seen a wave of recruiting talent come into the job search world. Some of my clients are recruiters that are used to negotiating on the other side but they don’t know how to do it as a candidate.

Impact Of Pay Transparency And Fairness Laws On Recruitment

That brings a really good humanistic tone to the equation because they know what it’s like to be on the other side of the table, the pressure that they face, and so forth. To turn the tables a bit on the past few years of what we’ve been seeing in the regulatory environments,  there’s been a pay fairness regulation and then also pay transparency laws across the United States where the pay range has been displayed. How do you see this type of communication impacting the market?

It’s a good thing. Candidates have been asking for this for a long time. They want to know approximately what the job is going to pay but it is a two-edged sword. Candidates would prefer to know precisely and exactly what the job is going to pay. Some of them think that salary transparency laws are the silver bullet that’s going to solve all the angst around negotiating pay, but you’re still looking at a range and you still want to be able to move up in that range.

 

Typically, if the job can be posted at more than one level, usually, the automation on the applicant tracking system will only allow you to post the job at one level. You’re going to post it probably at the lower of the two levels. For candidates, it is possible that they could pay you more than what’s being advertised, and because of that, sometimes recruiting teams suffer. A candidate will look at that range and they’ll say, “That’s too low. I’m not going to apply,” when in fact, they might even desire somebody who could come in at that higher level. Maybe instead of a director, they would like to have somebody who could operate as a senior director or something like that.

It scratches an itch for candidates. It does cause problems for companies that have inequitable or very secretive pay structures. You are a comp professional. You’ve probably seen this in your lifetime. Companies, especially smaller companies, have a separate deal with every person that they’ve hired. They have two people who are at the same level in the organization with vastly different pay packages. When they’re compelled to post ranges, which in the past has been political and secretive, this makes companies nervous that the person they’ve been underpaying for years is going to realize that they’re going to have to straighten their situation out. It’s a big topic. There are a lot of things we could comment on here.

One of the things that we’ve heard a lot of clients struggle with is when they’re posting the full range, it attracts the candidate to hire at the top of that range.

That is an unintended consequence. If the range is $150,000 to $220,000, they’re always going to say, “I want $220,000.” They are very frequently or commonly going to say that. It does help you to land in the range somewhere when you’re applying, which helps with the screening process. That’s an issue. Every state law is different in this respect, but some companies, if they can still comply, are posting the minimum to the midpoint. Some companies are posting ranges that are inclusive of the target incentives. In some cases, it’s salary only. These are things that the candidate doesn’t know unless the company spells it out specifically in their range.

How To Navigate Salary Negotiation During Interview

That’s a whole separate conversation on the recruiting side of the business. Perhaps this will be a great opportunity to have you back. Let’s go back to the heart of the salary negotiation piece. What is the best way for your clients when you’re coaching them on taking or having that interview? How does that journey look like?

Are you talking about the interview process itself?

Yes, and how they should influence that interview process.

The number one outcome that everybody’s looking for is they want to get selected. That’s the goal of the interview process. You want to be the one that the hiring manager says, “This is the person that I want.” As the recruiting leader, I’ve sat in on those debrief sessions where you pull the whole interview team together after you’ve interviewed 3 or 4 people and you ask the question, “How do you rate this person versus this person?” You’re trying to drive to a decision. I’ve had the inside track on those discussions for years.

One of the things that I’ve discovered that’s useful for candidates to know is that hiring is often emotional. It’s not as logical as people think. Some people think, “You’ve got all these qualifications. I’m going to hire the most qualified person.” Maybe. In a hiring manager’s mind, they’re imagining that they have certain problems that they want this person to solve and certain high-risk or high-impact things that they want them to effectively accomplish.

Hiring is often emotional. It is not as logical as people think. Share on X

The hiring manager has their own goals for the performance of the department. Their bonus might depend upon certain things that this person’s going to do, so deep inside somewhere, they’re wondering, “Am I going to hire a person who’s going to help me to get my bonus or am I going to hire a person who’s going to reduce my bonus?”

If you put yourself in the hiring manager’s shoes and mentality, interviewing becomes slightly different. It goes beyond, “They’re asking me a bunch of questions and I’m going to answer them as best I can.” The best candidates are ones who identify what the hiring manager wants to accomplish or the things that they’re most terrified of.

If you can help them avoid their biggest fears or attain their biggest ambitions, then you’ll be the one that they emotionally want to hire even if you’re less qualified than somebody else. They want somebody who’s going to come in and support their success. Many candidates miss this opportunity to sell themselves in a different way beyond answering the interview questions and nailing the answers to those questions. Does that help you?

It does. It sounds like you should highlight the value that you can bring and how you can do that as a trusted partner to the organization. Does that sound right?

Yeah. I’ll share a secret. This is an insider secret. To put some meat on the bone here, if you’re a candidate or somebody you know who is a candidate can use this, try it and use it. At the end of most interviews, you have a chance to ask a few questions. There are five minutes or something. They’re like, “What questions do you have for me?” A lot of people waste that time asking questions about the scope of the job or things like that and sometimes even the benefits. Those are curiosity satisfiers. If you’re going to move forward, you’ll have a chance to get your curiosity satisfied later. Now, you’re trying to be selected. Use this time to pitch yourself or sell yourself.

A good question to ask could be something like, “If you hire the wrong person for this, what’s the worst thing that could happen to you?” You could ask the hiring manager or anybody else that’s interviewing you. If you’re being interviewed by someone, they have personal stakes in this. If you’re hiring a peer or interviewing with a customer, they all have the nightmare scenario in their mind. They’d be like, “If we hire the wrong person, this is a bad thing that could happen to me.”

Once you know what that bad thing is, you can say something like, “If you hire me instead of someone else, you’re not going to have to worry about that.” You bring in the example, like, “You’re not going to have to worry about that because I have delivered similar projects on time and under budget. The worst-case scenario is we missed the go live on this project,” and then you can then say, “Let me tell you how I’ve done that.” What you’re doing is reassuring this interviewer that their worst-case scenario is not going to happen if they hire you instead of somebody else. Most of your competition’s not going to do this. That’s how you can work toward that emotional attachment that you’re looking for as a candidate.

Preparing For Salary Discussions During Job Offers

Once a candidate knows they’re going to get an offer, most people are uncomfortable talking about compensation, salary, and their needs. How do you prepare the folks that you work with in terms of getting them ready to have those conversations?

What I do in my coaching practice if I have a coaching client who wants that level of coaching is I invite them and suggest strongly, “We should talk at every major step of the process, especially when you get an offer.” I advise them if they get an offer, first of all, “Don’t accept it right away.” I give them an actual script. I say, “When you get an offer, this is what you say to buy yourself a couple of days.” The reason I do that, first of all, is I want them to call me right away so that we can work together to strategize how we’re going to approach this offer and discover if we have their best and final offer or if there are some things that can be adjusted or improved. In order to do that, you have to ask the right questions at the right time and in the right way. I coach them through all that.

To make this point real for people, the most leverage and power as a candidate that you ever have in this whole process is the time between when you get an offer and when you say yes. When I was recruiting, 80%-plus of the candidates I was pitching offers to would accept immediately. My strong advice is even if you love that offer and you’re so ready to put this uncertainty of the job search to bed, you don’t want any chance that you’re going to risk this. If you like it enough to say yes, that’s a giant red flag that you’re about ready to leave a lot of money on the table.

 

One of my clients came to me with that exact thing. He was a chief operating officer. He came to me and said, “John, I got an offer. I think it’s good enough.” I said, “Let’s talk this through.” We ended up working him through that process. This is a COO for a multibillion-dollar company. By the time we were done modifying that offer and negotiating with the CEO, his offer improved by over $600,000. That is an eye-popping thing. He almost left two Ferraris on the table because he was so ready to be done with the uncertainty.

Be very careful. Keep in mind that the companies that offer you a job where you’ve been selected, what they want more than anything is for you to say yes. When you are negotiating pay or anything for that matter, think of it this way. When someone wants something, usually, you can ask for something in return as long as it’s reasonable and as long as it’s win-win.

How do we keep that risk low? That’s the main thing that people are worried about. This is why people don’t negotiate. They’re terrified that somebody is going to pull that offer away, especially in a soft market like this. You can still get everything you want even in a soft market if you do it right. The key here is keeping the risk very low. That’s why I built the Salary.Coach method. It is to keep the risk low at every step. This helps people to do it. Does that help you, Howard?

Yes.

That’s good.

You hit the nail on the head. Most people are afraid. They’re like, “If I ask for something, they’re going to rescind the offer.” People lose sight that the company has invested a lot of time and effort in selecting the candidate that they don’t want to start over.

You’re so right, Howard. There are usually two things that can go on. One is that they have a silver medalist in the wings and the other is that they don’t. Most of the time, they don’t. Maybe 20% or 30% of the time in my recruiting career, we have a strong silver medalist that they would be as happy with. Most of the time, there are bigger problems with the silver medalist so they have a hard decision to make. They’re like, “Do we go back and keep looking or do we take a bigger risk?”

Hiring people is always a risk. If you hire the wrong person, it’s the biggest disaster ever for a hiring manager. It hurts their reputation. It hurts their team morale. It’s everything, so people are cautious. If you’ve been selected, it means you’ve gotten rid of the fears. You are right. They don’t want to go back. If the time to fill is 60 or 90 days, guess what? If they go back to the beginning, they’re going to have to wait another 60 or 90 days. Meanwhile, the people on the team are frustrated that they have to do two jobs. This is a nightmare scenario. You have a lot of leverage during this time. Don’t overplay your hand. Also, another bit of free advice, don’t be somebody that you’re not. Don’t change your personality.

Do not be somebody you are not. Do not change your personality. Share on X

Something that most people might be wondering is how often it happens when an offer gets rescinded because of the negotiation process. It’s pretty rare, in my experience. It doesn’t happen very often. It’s something people are terrified of. It’s like playing Russian roulette with a revolver that holds 100 rounds and there’s only 1 bullet in there somewhere. The only way that bullet is even going to be pulled is usually if your personality changes.

People often think they have to be aggressive to negotiate their pay, for example. That is not true. You should be nice in this process. That’s when my phone rings as a recruiting leader. A hiring manager says, “I really liked Howard. He was the best person we’ve interviewed so far, but now that we’re negotiating, there’s something very different about Howard. Now, I’m worried that the Howard that we interviewed is not the Howard we’re going to get.”

That’s a good point.

That’s the one. That’s the thing that tends to poison the well. The hiring manager starts to think, “Am I hiring the wrong person? That’s what gets the offer rescinded more than anything else. It’s not as much about the numbers if you’re handling it right.

What do you think there, Sumit? I know that you’ve been itching to share your thoughts.

Handling Salary Negotiations In Markets With Limited Salary Transparency

I have a question. In my part of the world, the salary negotiation process usually begins early and there’s a lot more opacity. There’s no legal mandate to put out the salary range for a position so you can say, “We pay competitive salaries,” or, “We pay industry-leading salaries,” when the salary is nowhere close to industry-leading.

It’s also accepted practice for a recruiter to call you and insist on knowing your current salary. Usually, they base your future salary on a percentage increase on that. Until you’ve gone through and made it to the final round, you don’t really know what is the number that’s on offer. If you insist too strongly, they would drop you as a candidate very often and even larger companies. What would your advice be on how to not get kicked out of the race? The silver medalist would be a bit of a faraway scenario where you’re not even allowed to participate in the race at times.

Sumit, what you suggested is a common problem in all markets. Before I get into the answer, can you tell me what geography you are in? That might be helpful to me.

I’m based in India.

In most of my experiences in the US and in Europe, which are also different markets, what you described is a very common thing. If you’re in a market where there’s a ton of competition, it’s a lot easier to remove somebody from consideration early in that screening process. If you’ve got 100 really qualified people, you can be insanely picky and you have to be very careful.

There are a couple of techniques that I suggest. When your phone rings and somebody says, “What’s your pay requirement?” That recruiter wants to know, “Can I get you?” This is true everywhere. A recruiter who is screening on the front end will not be a recruiter for very long if they’re tying up the hiring manager and the hiring team’s time with somebody that they can’t close in the end.

They do have a range that they’re thinking about because all people aren’t the same. Unless you’re talking about completely commodity skills, you have a help desk analyst and it pays $37.16 cents an hour and it’s not going to be anything different from that. Most salary positions have a range that they would consider depending on the experiences, talents, and value of the person. The trick is you want to land inside that range somewhere. You want to be answering that question, “Can I get you with a yes?”

The easiest, lowest-risk thing for recruiters to do, and this is what I train recruiters to do, is to get a number early in that stage because you have a range. You want to know if the number fits in the range. You’re in the box or you’re not in the box. You say yes or no. If that answer is a yes, you go on to look at their qualifications. Are they qualified? Are they interested? This early screening process, Sumit, I call it QIA, which is Qualified, Interested, and Affordable. If you’re not all three of those, you should not be moving forward in the process.

How do you avoid lowballing yourself at this stage? What I advise my clients to do, and in the Salary.Coach method all throughout this is a staple, is to answer the question, “What’s your salary requirement at this stage?” with a range of your own. Don’t give a number. You can say, “I appreciate the question. I want to be transparent about that because, in the end, we all want this to work. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell you that I’m in an active job search and I’m talking to other companies. The range that I’m discussing with them is between A and B.” If they want you and they like your qualifications and your level of interest and your range overlaps their range in some way, usually, you can satisfy that affordability question and move forward.

You’re doing a couple of things for yourself here at this step. You’re not bringing in, “I’ve done my research and this is what my research says,” because that’s really easy to argue with. Instead, you’re saying, “I’m talking to other companies and this is the range that I’m discussing with them.” They know that if they want to get you, they’re competing with somebody else. That improves your value.

If there are multiple companies coming at you and they all are interested, that communicates to the person on the other end of the phone that you’re going to be gone soon, that you’re a hot commodity, and that there’s something about you that other people like. In the world of psychology, we call that social proof. There’s another thing I refer to in my book. I call it mimetic desire.

The example I use in my book is a room filled with toys. You’ve got a giant room filled with toys. There are 100 toys in this room and you have 2 toddlers. You have two two-year-olds in a room full of toys. Toddler A picks up one of the toys, and which toy does toddler B want? Always 100% of the time, it’s the toy that toddler A picked up. This is human nature across the world. It’s sorcery that candidates can use to help them become more valuable in the eyes of people, to create a sense of competition, and to have competition that helps them at every step of the process.

Is this going to work every time, Sumit? Probably not, but when it does work, it’s going to work most of the time. When you get into the interview and you create a range and haven’t painted yourself into a corner, you use the interview to improve your value and move up in your own range. You’re creating that sense of competition. The idea here is you want the best initial offer that you can get.

It’s a common mistake to think that negotiating begins when you have an offer. Negotiation is a process that starts in the application even when they ask you how much. Sumit, sometimes, if not most of the time, you can find out what the range is even if it hasn’t been published. This is how you might do that. When they ask you what your pay requirement is, you can say, “That’s great. I’m willing to answer that and be very transparent. Let’s work together on this, but first, can you tell me what your budget is for the position?” You then have to be very quiet for about eight seconds. If you look at your watch and figure out, “What does eight seconds of silence feel like?” It starts to get painful. People will tend to fill that silence with their own voice.

When I’m training people to interview, hiring managers, and hiring teams to interview candidates, this is a primary thing that I try to teach people, ask a hard interview question, and then be quiet. It communicates that you are expecting an answer here. They could say, “I’m not going to answer that question,” but most of the time, they will. If they say, “I’m not going to answer that question,” or, “It’s a very broad range. It could be almost anything,” then you answer with your own range. Your own range can be very wide as well.

Most of the time, they’re going to give you their range. If they do, then your range should overlap theirs. A little tip here, make the top end of your range above the top end of theirs because very often, there’s another grade above that they might be able to offer the ideal candidate. Recruiters like me want to set a candidate’s expectations as low as possible. When it comes time to offer the job to someone, we want them to say yes. We don’t want to offer something that’s less than what we’ve talked about. We would prefer to offer something that’s a little more.

An illustration here is if you say your salary requirement is $92,000 a year and we agree to move forward on that, and the offer comes in at $88,000, you’re going to be disappointed and you might say no. If the recruiter pushed your expectations down to $85,000 and agreed to interview anyway and the offer comes in at $88,000, you feel a different way, and your chances of closing that candidate as a recruiter improve. This is why recruiters often will shove that expectation down. They try to make you feel like the actual hiring number or range is going to be lower than it is. They’ll never tell you that there’s a grade above. If the top of the range is $220,000, they will not want to tell you that this could pay $240,000.

We’ve gone over a lot of pieces here and we’re coming to the end of our time. There is so much to talk about on this topic that we could explore. We should have you again on many fronts to talk about the salary negotiation, negotiation in general, and then also looking on the recruiter side on how to optimize the recruiting process.

I would love to do that with you, Sam. Anytime. This has been a joy.

Key Takeaways For Job Seekers In Navigating Salary Negotiations

For the people that are tuning in out there that are maybe in a job search, maybe they’re thinking about negotiating their salary, or maybe they have a few offers on the table, what are the things that we want them to walk away from this conversation? What are the top things they should be thinking about?

The number one mistake that people make is taking the offer immediately. Don’t do that to yourself. If you get an offer, you’re welcome to reach out to me and I’ll help you to optimize that. The other big takeaway is to know that the negotiation process is a process that starts early. I can help people to make a lot more money if they engage with me sooner rather than at the offer stage.

There are several ways you can learn this stuff. You can reach out to me personally and I’ll help you. You can pick up a copy of my book. It’s on Amazon. It’s a great resource and goes through what to say and how to say it at all the steps. It doesn’t have me coaching you. The third option is the Salary.Coach Academy, which is a series of bite-sized video lessons on how to talk about pay at every single step of the process. Academy members can upgrade to time with me if they want. If there’s anybody that would be interested in that, reach out to me and I can give you a 60% off coupon. Especially during this holiday season, I want to make that much more affordable for everyone. Let me know if you’re interested in that and I can guide you down the path there.

Addressing Concerns About Age And Gender

That’s such a great offer there. Before we conclude our call, we have one more question that came in. I wonder if you have time to address this. There are different regulations around the world as far as communicating pay or asking about past pay and also age, gender, and so forth and different things. Could you help us answer this question? How do you address concerns about your age and its potential impact on your salary negotiation, especially when employers may have concerns about your long-term commitment to the organization?

I’m glad you raised this topic. In fact, we could talk for an hour about this. I will get to it quickly. In the Salary.Coach Academy, in fact, I have a whole video on how to address this. I’ll talk about it briefly. You can hide your age or disguise your age on your resume and CV fairly easily, but you can’t hide it when you’re on camera or interviewing in person. You have to go into that.

If you are an aging professional north of 50 years old, you have to understand that people have a bias. This is a tape that is playing in their head. As soon as they see those gray hairs, this is what they’re going to think. Don’t be offended by this, but this is what people think. They think you’re going to retire soon. They think maybe you haven’t learned anything new in the last ten years. They think you’re not going to be adaptable or change easily, that you’re going to be stubborn and stuck in your ways, and all of these things. Even with technology, maybe you don’t know any new technology. You’re not current on your technology.

If that’s what the interviewer is thinking, you cannot confirm that bias during the interview. If you show up and your energy level is low and they think, “He’s old, so his energy level is going to be low,” that confirms all these other biases in their mind. You have to show up with a high energy level. You have to show up with current technology or examples of current technology, that you are on the cutting edge, and that you are adaptable.

When the interview questions start to come, you need to work some of this stuff into your answer so you’re defying the stereotype and defying the bias. What they once thought before you opened your mouth, they realize that that’s not true. They realize that you’re going to hit the ground running and that you know the latest and greatest. If you can do all that, all of your experience becomes valuable instead of all these points of risk like, “This person’s going to be too stubborn to adjust,” or, “They’re going to be expensive but not bringing the value.”

I hope that that at least sets the table on this issue. We can’t solve the issue of ageism. With regulation, it’s going to be difficult. This bias is insidious and it lives everywhere. It’s going to be up to candidates to prepare themselves to defy the bias. Do not show up to an interview with a flip phone that’s eighteen years old. Do not give examples that are from many years ago.

 

That’s good advice. John, I want to thank you once again. It has been a pleasure having you on the show. We’ve learned a lot here and our audience has as well. I’m looking forward to our next discussion on the topic. This has been rich and filled with a lot of additional questions I would love to ask but we don’t have enough time.

Thank you, Sam. I’d be happy to come back if there’s interest in that.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us. We’ll see you on the next episode of the show.

 

Important Links

• John Gates on LinkedIn
• Salary.Coach
• Recruiting Transformations
• Act Your Wage

 

About John Gates

John Gates is a seasoned professional specializing in recruitment and talent acquisition, with a focus on salary negotiation coaching. As the founder of Recruiting Transformations, he leverages his extensive experience to assist individuals and organizations in navigating the complexities of compensation discussions.

With a background that includes significant roles in human resources and recruitment, John has developed a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities within the hiring process. His expertise encompasses talent acquisition strategies, employee engagement, and organizational development.

At Recruiting Transformations, John offers personalized coaching services aimed at empowering job seekers to effectively negotiate salaries and benefits. His approach is tailored to individual needs, providing clients with the tools and confidence to secure favorable compensation packages.

In addition to his coaching services, John collaborates with organizations to enhance their recruitment processes, ensuring that compensation strategies are competitive and aligned with industry standards. His insights contribute to building strong employer-employee relationships and fostering workplace satisfaction.

John’s commitment to professional development is evident through his active engagement with industry trends and best practices. He is dedicated to continuous learning and applies this knowledge to benefit his clients and the broader community.