My last two posts on negotiation prompted some amazing feedback and concerns. I was not surprised to hear how many of you were uneasy about disclosing your salary to recruiters, but I was shocked to hear the reason why. Many of you did not want to tell outside agency recruiters your salary because you thought they would undercut your offer. In case this is not known, Headhunters are paid a portion of the salary you are hired on. The more money you make, the more money they make. Sure, not every headhunter has the same contract with every firm,
Office 2010 Discount, but this one I describe is very standard. If a headhunter wants to know your salary,
Office Professional, they are likely already calculating how much money they can make off your placement. And now to corporate recruiters . . . they don’t get paid to place you; they just get a straight salary. In large firms (like Microsoft),
microsoft Office 2010 Serial, there are whole departments of people called “compensation consultants” who spend their entire job making sure that salaries are equitable amongst different teams. This insistence on equity leaves far less room in a salary range than you might imagine. I promise you, I have never had a conversation with a hiring manager that went something like,
Windows 7 Enterprise Key, “Yeah, he only wants 80K so even though the rest of the team is making 95K. I think we can just pay him that." It does not happen. In fact,
Office Professional, I had a recent example of this final month where I gave a guy a 30K pay raise in his offer just to make sure his salary was equitable. He nearly fell over. And for those of you on visas who are being hired from outside the US and are worried we might be reducing your salary . . . guess again. The legal department pulls the salaries of the other employees on the team when they process your visa just to make sure it is equitable. I will admit ignorance in small firms . . . maybe this “price undercutting” in salaries happens in firms with little regulation or formal HR functions. But aside from that, I will stick by my story that, most of the time, the recruiter is your compensation ally . . . know how to use them to your benefit. Jenna