Job Interviews: Team Applicant

Are you looking for a job? Here are some extremely helpful tips and mini-scripts for negotiating salary from Boston Globe columnist Penelope Trunk. In my experience, HR tries *very* hard, to the point of unpleasantness, to establish your salary range before you have a face-to-face interview. In her blog post, Trunk points out, correctly, that you, the applicant, are in the driver's seat, because as Trunk states," the company cannot make you an offer without also offering a salary." You do not "have" to provide salary requirements or expectations right off the bat. I've delayed the salary discussion very much as Trunk suggests, with interesting results - it turned out that the job I was interviewing for had a lower budget ceiling than I had hoped, but the good news was that I was hired at the very top of that budget range.

In my case, during the initial "routine HR" interview, the HR rep clearly stated her concern that my expectations would not be met by the amount the department budgeted for the position. I countered by stating that the salary was only a portion of the compensation and that I needed to see the space in which I would be working before I could determine what salary I would be content with. This was actually true, but I was prepared to go further and state that I needed to meet the entire team to see if the job was a good fit, which wasn't exactly true.

After reading this blog post, I would have simply countered the rep's peeved-sounding question "Why don’t you want to give your salary requirements?“ with Trunk's beautifully simple line "I think you have a good idea of what this position is worth to your company, and that’s important information for me to know.” If I had caved in to the HR rep's demand that I name a narrow (10-15K) range within the established, publicly available salary range for the position's salary grade ( range of 25K), I might have underestimated the top of the ceiling. As it was, in the final phone conversation when the HR rep made the offer, she stated to the dollar the top salary budgeted - so eventually I learned what the position was worth to the company, by delaying the conversation about salary until it was clear it was a mutually agreeable position in all other aspects.

One caveat: if you are new to the company, you might get screened out as "difficult" by HR and never get to meet the hiring manager. However, in my experience in nonprofits, hiring managers have as much input as HR on a hiring decision, and sometimes ask to see all resumes that come in for the position, whether or not they have been screened by internal HR.