Negotiating Your First Offer
Receiving an offer is cause for celebration: You’ve navigated a difficult job market and sufficiently impressed an employer! Regardless, there is still work to be done. If this is your first position, you likely have little or no experience with offer negotiation. But an offer is inherently impersonal, and has room for flexibility. As an individual with unique qualifications, you actually have plenty of leeway to discuss and negotiate any initial offer.
However, there are a great many considerations to juggle when doing so, and it all can become overwhelming. As such, it’s worth noting that some of the most underrated value an interview coach provides is in guiding offerees through this part of the process. Having a specific interest in your success, a coach will know you and understand your value. Teaching you the same for this and all future offers? Clearly, coaching is well worth the investment.
Especially because navigating the market alone is difficult. At the very most basic level, recipients of an offer must feel comfortable evaluating their entire package --including salary, bonuses, vacation time, performance review schedules, etc.-- and understanding whether or not it matches one’s value. Your GPA, educational institution, internship, location, and volunteer history all have real worth. But it’s imperative that you can connect that worth to an actual financial figure.
Because it’s from this place that the nuances of negotiation spring. You need to know if your offered salary is below market value before you can learn how and when to propose a counter-offer, nevermind doing it with confidence and positivity! You must understand your value if you’re to intelligently choose between multiple offers, and respond professionally to those you are rejecting. You need to understand non-compete clauses, exempt vs. non-exempt employment, and how these esoteric clauses and catches might hurt your potential future earnings or mobility.
You also deserve a clear idea of what your work-life will actually look like. Will you be getting a performance review, or a salary review? When? On what metrics will you be evaluated? What are the contingencies of the offer? How are bonuses calculated? Is there a probation period? If so, how long? If you don’t know these things, then you have work to do.
Perhaps this all feels overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to. With a little bit of guidance and experience, this process can be mastered. Entering the workforce is an inherently discomfiting proposition, especially when confronted with all there is to know, and how little you know of it.
But you’ve been led here by a finely-tuned internal compass. You already know what’s most important to you, whether that be a high salary, a great work-life balance, room for growth in your position, or a certain class of deliverable. Trust your instincts, of course, but be comfortable reaching out to those who can guide you through the job market, glean your worth, and lobby in your favor. For these reasons and more, an interview coach really is a priceless investment, not just for the offers you hope to get, but the ones you’ve already gotten, that you want to make the most of.
To learn more about what an interview coach can do for you, reach out to me, Nancy, at www.IdealInterviewCo.com/contact, or find me on LinkedIn.