Hi, everyone. I'm Lenne. Uh Len Mendel. They, them, I'm gonna be talking about negotiation, how to advocate for yourselves. I'll be specifically talking about negotiating offers, what to do when you're a candidate. A little bit about what to do when you're an employee.But hopefully this advice and, and these phrases are gonna be helpful regardless of the situation you're in. My whole goal is to hope I, my whole goal is for you all to leave this session feeling empowered. So I'm gonna get started and yes, these are gonna be recorded to be shared later. Um, just a little bit of context. Uh So I'm one half of a small business called Dangor Mendel, my business partner, Adam and I are interview and negotiation coaches. We're both engineers. I spent uh some, some time as a manager and really have seen the other side of organizations in figuring out how do we hire engineers and people in general, how do we negotiate with them? How do we assess perform? How do we figure out, uh, what to pay people when to give promotions and raises? And one of the things a Adam and I have come together to do in the past couple of years is that we want to empower candidates and employees with that information and, and peeling back that side of the curtain so that you all can be more effective and really reclaim a little bit of the, the power imbalance that sometimes exists in employment.

Hey, everyone. Cool. It's, it's nice to see you in the chat. Feel free to ask questions and give some specifics. I'm gonna be sharing some general advice. You know what Adam and I do is we work with candidates one on one because the specifics really matter when someone is trying to figure out like when a candidate wants to know, what do I ask for? Right? How much, how much money do I ask for? Uh what should I prepare for this specific interview? We look at the specifics of that industry, that company that who you're gonna be talking to. And uh so the specifics can really matter that said, uh there's some general lessons that we've learned that we'd like to share.

And we've also been putting these up as videos on youtube under the candidate planet channel. And you can also follow me on linkedin or subscribe to our newsletter at ment.com in order to receive those updates and we try to put out new content every other week uh around interview, best practices and negotiation. So let's get into the content. I'm gonna be mostly talking about how to negotiate a job offer. Um I'll also at the end, talk a little bit, especially if there's interest. I can talk about how do you share your compensation expectations before you get an offer? Especially before you've even been interviewing and how can you negotiate a raise? Hey, another negotiation mentor here. That's awesome. Um Always interested to hear what other people think of this. So let's talk about negotiation. Now, first of all, this is gonna be a short conversation.

You've done all your interviews and at some point, a hiring manager, recruiter, someone's gonna call you up and say, hey, uh we'd love to offer you this role. Uh this, this job opportunity, we really like talking with you. How does this sound? And you know, some people will say, well, let's not negotiate until you have a written offer that can depend on the industry and especially in tech, you're gonna be leaving money on the floor because a lot of companies, they want to sort out the big picture before they're pulling up the paperwork before they're getting all the executive approval.

And if there's an, there's, I know it's scary to have this conversation. It's hard to think on the spot. I'm gonna give you a strategy and specific statements you can use that you can practice ahead of time to be more effective in this conversation. But whenever possible, having a conversation is gonna be way more effective than trying to conduct a negotiation over email or then waiting until after you have the written offer. Um, this tone matters, you can have a back and forth. You can, you can have this conversation in a, in a way that's gonna be faster. You're not gonna be seen as difficult and of course, you're not making a decision when you get the written offer. If things are different, you absolutely can say, hey, let's, I think, let's talk about this. I I misunderstood this isn't, this isn't what I thought we talked about and then you can clarify or if there's, you know, certain details. Once you see the written offer, that's often the time you get a lawyer involved, you figure out maybe some details about a non-compete or about, you know, the side business. How do we handle this? Uh If you're a higher at the higher up you go in an organization that those contracts can get pretty detailed severance. And then there's other considerations that you might want to involve, involve a lawyer in.

But the big picture of, of pay and equity and, and the signing bonus and these sorts of things just having a conversation upfront is gonna be the way to go. So it's a short conversation. It's really stressful. You don't want to be trying to figure things out on the spot. There's two numbers you wanna figure out ahead of time. The first is your minimum. That's what you're comfortable walking away from. You don't wanna be figuring that out in the middle of this conversation, right? The other thing you wanna know is what to ask for what you're happy with. And for this whole part of this uh this part of the talk, I'm gonna be talking just about compensation just about um like your base salary as an example. And that's because when you're negotiating, you're gonna wanna move through what you care about in order one at a time, maybe you care about compensation because you know, that's, that's money in the bank. Uh It's, it's a big commitment from companies. It can be hard to do so maybe start there and then you can move on to signing bonus or equity or time off, but it doesn't matter whatever you care about, you order it and you're gonna move through it one by one. Once you're making a decision, you're making a decision. Once you've negotiated.

Once you've figured out your final offer, when you make a decision, you can think about, you know what this whole package means and the culture and you know, there's lots of factors that go into making a, a decision, but when you're negotiating, you're gonna move through things 11 pillar at a time.

Uh Don't let recruiters bully you into, into considering the whole package when you're negotiating. So, um all that is to say is that we're gonna be, I'm gonna be giving you uh this example all the way through compensation but you can apply these phrases and strategy to each pillar. Cool. So you have these two numbers figured out ahead of time. Now, I know of course, this is these are like the million dollar question like what do I ask? Uh And this is where honestly it's so specific that if you are currently a candidate and you're trying to figure out what to ask, feel free to send me a message on linkedin. Um However, you want to get in touch with me, you can email me at Len at Candidate planet.com, for example, uh sub and it's gonna be a lot easier to figure that out on the spot. I'll talk a little bit about that at the end. But let's say you have these two numbers, we're working backwards. This means that when you get an initial offer, there's three scenarios uh that that might happen, you might get an initial offer that's above your happy number in between or below your minimum.

And I want to go through each situation. What do you do on the spot? Maybe you've gotten an email ahead of time from the recruiter, maybe you know what to expect. But um often you're going into this, you know, you're having this, this phone call and you don't know what to expect until it happens. Ok? Regardless of the scenario you're in, you're in a recruiter or a hiring manager or whomever says we're so excited to offer you this job opportunity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What do you say? The first thing you say always is something positive? Thank you. I'm thrilled to receive this offer. It's gonna make this like this. Here we go. Thanks. I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled to receive this offer. Uh It was so great to meet everyone on the team. I'm so excited about your technology or your mission. Whatever you genuinely feel, share that gratitude, share that excitement. You're, you're building a long term relationship here and, and that's really nice. Now, of course, let's get down to the brass tacks, how to negotiate. So let's suppose that you would have been happy with 100 and 50,000, but they've offered you 100 and 65. That's amazing. That exceeds your expectations. You're gonna feel really good in the moment.

And the thing here is that sometimes candidates come to Adam and I afterwards, uh and say, you know, I accept it right away and now I feel like I'm, you know, did I leave money on the table? Should I have negotiated? Was I so underpaid before that my expectations were just really low. You know, maybe six months later, you're talking with a coworker and you're like, wait, you got a signing bonus or like that's what you earn. So, um you know, that's the point of negotiation. It's not necessarily to get more. You can't, you can't guarantee that's gonna happen, but we can guarantee is that you don't have regrets that you feel like I asked all these questions, I explored this offer. And when I, when I came down to me making a decision, I had the best, I knew I had the best opportunity that, that I could decide on that. I didn't, you know, I didn't uh misrepresent anything. So we want to open all those doors. So that said, you don't want to introduce a lot of risk in this situation. What's a gentle way to start the negotiation? My favorite phrase is to say something like is there room to negotiate? Is this negotiable? And sometimes they'll say no, this is the top of our, our band or we don't do negotiation here or whatever. And you say, OK, thanks. That's not a problem. Now, let's talk about a signing bonus or whatever.

The next thing is that you wanted to talk about, let's talk about time off, let's talk about an education fund, whatever I'm trying to and I'm trying to, oh, thanks for resharing my email. Yeah, I'm trying to watch the chat as well. Um OK, now that said sometimes and often things are negotiable. Now, they've done this before. They're not gonna come back and say, well, yeah. Um We actually, this is negotiable. We actually would offer 100 and 80. They're not gonna tell you where, what they can offer. They're probably gonna respond. If you say if you ask if something's negotiable, they're gonna say, well, what were you thinking? And so then, and you have a number. This is another number you've prepared ahead of time. It's in your back pocket. You just know I'm gonna add 5000, 10,000 to an initial offer that exceeds my expectations. I'm just gonna say, hey, I was thinking closer to 170. Is that possible? Hey, I like round numbers. Can we round up? Uh, especially if you're getting an offer. That's, that's weird. You know, I've seen this work, I've seen this go from 90 to 100,000 simply by saying someone saying, hey, iii I uh I like round numbers. Can we move this up to 100,000? So something gentle regardless of what they say because this is all amazing. This is all above what you were expecting. They might say. Sure. That sounds great. In which case, I'd be like, oh, I wonder if I could have asked for more. Uh They might say, well, let me run this by someone. I'll get back to you.

They might say, oh, we can only do 100 and 67. They might say, you know what? We actually can't, you know, they, they might have asked the question even though they're like, no, we actually can't change this at all. It's our policy, blah, blah, blah, whatever they say, you say. Great. Thank you. That sounds fine. Now let's talk about a signing bonus. It's not a big back and forth here. Ok. Now let's get to the meat of things. Scenario number two. this is the classic situation where you've received an offer, your minimum is 130. You, you would accept, you would accept this offer of 150. It's higher than your minimum, but it's lower than your happy number. Maybe you've been talking with your network. You've been doing some research and you think, you know, I think I could go as high as 165 and I, I just wanna see if that's possible, right? What do you do? In this case, I'm gonna give you a bunch of phrases that you can use to explore this offer, this, this particular pillar of compensation. And I should say, you know, I'm giving all of this when things change a little bit, if you have multiple offers. Um Also, even if you're currently employed, that's leverage too. Some places have to pull you away from what you currently have. I mean, you know, for all they know you're very happily employed, you're probably not. That's why you're looking elsewhere, but they don't need to know that.

But I, I want to give you phrases that you can use even if you feel like you don't have a lot of other leverage, even if your, your timeline is very tight. So uh let's go through that. Uh a great phrase to use is I'd love to join, but I'm looking at roles around 100 and 65,000. So the main strategy here is that you don't say anything negative about the initial offer because you actually would accept it. You're just not accepting right away you're exploring.

So what you wanna say is, well, look over here, this is some of the things that I care about, you know, let can we make this work and you want to be very positive. There's this maybe a little bit of a pop culture stereotype that negotiation means being cagey that you can't be nice. And that is not true for employment conversations. You want this company, this whoever you're talking with to, to think that they are your number one choice that you are su super excited to join. You're passionate about what they're doing. You're gonna be this obvious uh you know, next step when you know, when you're a candidate, this is, this is the job for you. But now that you have this offer, you just have to figure out what works. And, and so that's what you're you're doing and you want them to be an ally and an advocate for you in, in making this work, right? Their, their goals are generally a recruiter, hiring manager, whoever it is, their, their goals are generally aligned with yours but not 100%. And, and that's why this is a little bit of a negotiation, right? You have to assert what you want in order for there to be be a negotiation. So other ways to do that, I'm looking for a competitive offer.

And for me that's an offer in the region of 165 other roles, I'm looking at seem to be closer to 165. Is there any way we can get close to that? Now? You never want to lie. You never wanna say you have other offers if you don't, but you're talking with other recruiters, you're doing your research, you might even be a candidate somewhere else, right? Um You know, so you can clarify what, what you're interested in. You know, you don't have to do a lot of explaining by the way and, you know, you'll notice all you're doing is asserting what you're interested in and, and, and seeing how you can make things work that said sometimes when you're a candidate, you know, early in the process, especially if you're talking with a recruiter, they, you know, they might have a certain idea of the band.

You go through all these interviews, you talk to the hiring manager, there's some leveling. Oh, are you L three or L four? Is this a managerial role? Is it senior? You know, you might have changed some of your responsibilities and understanding or your title by the end of the process and if you're talking with a recruiter, they might not know exactly how that all landed, you know, just, just in case, right? So sometimes you can maybe bring that up again, given the responsibilities of this role, this is more strategic. I'll be managing people, I'll be responsible for this. I'll be bringing in some additional security expertise, you know, whatever it is. I think that something around 165 would be a fair market rate. Here's a phrase, you know, this, I'm actually gonna look at this because this one isn't great, but, you know, it kind of works, that's a little lower than I was expecting. It's maybe as, as, as negative as you want to be about where the initial offer is. Um instead of saying like here's what I'm looking for, it's fine. Uh I'm a little disappointed. I was thinking closer to 165. I love that part. Can we meet in the middle? Classic negotiation? You can do better. OK. So when you say I was thinking closer to 165 usually the response again, they're not gonna say, well, usually the response is going to be, what were you thinking? Oh, sorry, I'm sorry.

When you say I was saying closer to 165 usually the response is we can't go that high. You know, they're just gonna say like that's, that's outside of our, our bands, whatever. They're just gonna, they're gonna say that they're not gonna say how high they can go, but that's what you want to know. You want to maximize, you wanna get the top of whatever they would pay someone to do the same work. How high can you go? That's the question you, that's that you wanna ask in return. That's the million dollar question. That's what you want to know. Practice saying this every night before you brush your teeth so that you get used to saying how high can you go and then sticking something in your mouth so that you stop talking because I don't know when I get nervous, I tend to ramble and I can undermine what I'm really going for.

They've done this before. They're professional. Uh If, if you've asked for 100 and 65 and they've said that we can't go that high. And then you say, well, how high can you go? They know how to, they know how to answer, they know how to say no, put the ball back in their court. So I love this question. Um I think this one's very helpful. A quick aside. Um This is, I call this scenario two B which is that sometimes the happy sometimes of the range that you're looking for for a role is quite, quite wide, quite big. If, if this is your first job out of college or out of a coding school, those ranges, you know, for those early career jobs, they can be pretty narrow, they're very well understood. It might not even be a range, it might be a specific amount, they might not even do negotiation. It's still valuable to ask all these questions and to feel good about this process, you're starting this long term work relationship, you deserve to feel good about it from the beginning. But there are other roles that have big ranges.

Um more senior roles, people can be in architect, director levels for many years. And so those there's a big range because those can encapsulate lots of different um levels in a sense. Uh our experiences uh some newer roles like DEV RLL data science, like the industry is just trying to figure out what to pay people, you know, in those, in those roles, Dev used to be like this 10 years ago for whatever reason, sometimes there's big ranges, maybe you were massively underpaid previously.

And so your minimum is just lower because you're like, I can live like this, but you're starting to realize maybe you can ask for more. So in those cases, um in, in these cases, and I just want to say again, oh, this is where specifics really matter. I've worked with people and for example, someone who went from 90,000 was OK with 120 we were doing the research and we're like, I really think you should ask for 180 she did and there was not even an argument. They were like, great. This sounds awesome. So uh it's hard to give general advice, but sometimes you, the offer is 120. If you were to say, well, I'm looking for 180 the other person might say, well, I guess we don't have a fit, like, I guess I should just put my time into other candidates because this is so, um this is not possible for us at all. Right. So sometimes you're gonna be, want to be ready to reset what your happy number is. And then you can use all of the same phrases and strategy from, you know, scenario two, but just in a more, uh, it's sort of tenable way they offer 120 you say? Well, ok, I'm looking at roles closer to 140. It all really depends on who you're talking with and the relationship and situation and your, your risk level, you know, tolerance and, and lots of things.

But I just want to throw that out there as a possibility because, um, especially I think for women and people who are underrepresented in tech, it's, it's, it's easy to get that really wide range because of, you know, for historical reasons. Ok, let's move on to scenario number three, this is the scenario where the offer is lower than your minimum. And at the beginning treat this like scenario 201 25. Well, you know, I was, I was looking at roles in the one forties. How can we, you know, is that, is that possible? How do we get closer to that? And, and maybe, you know, the, the base gets pushed up and, you know, by the end of that short conversation. Uh, you know, it's, it's above 130. And so, you know, you're, you're in that territory, sometimes you're gonna end that conversation and it won't get pushed up, it'll still be below your minimum. And, um, before I go into what to do in that situation, I just want to talk about end game. How do you end this conversation? Um, yeah, someone asked, what's the gap that's considered? OK? For o for offer to happy. It's so, it's so specific, I've seen it literally almost 100,000 and sometimes it's like we're fighting over like, you know, a few 1000. It really depends.

Um Oh, the previous, we'll get to some of these questions in a bit. I'm gonna let me go through the end game and then we're gonna get to this. OK. So there's a, there's a bit of back and forth, but you know, how do you end these conversations? Because you're not necessarily trying to make a decision immediately. Let, let's look at the first scenario where you feel very happy. This is, this is the offer is, you know, meets all meets and exceeds all of your expectations. You don't have other opportunities, you really know that you're gonna accept this. You can be very positive. It's, it's, it's OK to even verbally accept if you want. Uh what we've talked about sounds great. I'm excited to join, you know, pending review of details in the written offer.

You can always put that in there so that you can and you know, talk about the details and the specifics if, if that, you know, if, if that is an issue and that's something Adam and I often do is, you know, read, read through the specifics and you know, make sure that um you know, people feel fully comfortable with the relationship they're entering into this life changing decision.

Uh Another thing that you can say because you don't have to accept right away is just, this looks great, but it's my policy to never make big life changing decisions without sleeping on it first. Or it's, you know, my policy to, you know, I need to discuss this with my partner before accepting. If this is not your policy right now, just go ahead and make it your policy so that you have this response comfortably in your toolkit in any pressure, full situation. It's just not my policy to accept right in right away, but then do be communicative, do get back to them within 24 to 48 hours. Again, if you're weighing timelines from different offers, that's uh a bit of a different situation. Um But generally, you know, there's, there's a momentum that you're trying to move forward with and, and you're trying to get, you know, you're asking someone to advocate on your behalf. Uh Potentially we'll get into like exceptions and, and that sort of thing in, in a second.

So you want things to move pretty quickly. Um Rescission is um not, I've never, I if you go about negotiation in the, using the strategy and the, and the methods I'm talking about here, I've never seen an offer get rescinded for having this kind of negotiation. However, ghosting is a big issue. I mean, as the candidates face all the time, especially early in the process, you don't hear back from a recruiter, recruiters are trying to invest in the candidates that they think are going to lead to success. So that is something you have to be mindful of and no company wants to be sloppy seconds, right? No company. If you're like, oh, I can't wait to join. This is my number one company and then you're like, wait three weeks to talk to them again. They can't, you know, it's like they know something's up. So that level of communication is maybe again, more specific, um I can maybe give more specific advice on that um separately. But uh you know, generally this is these are easy cases, right? This is the, the scenario one, let's say you're in a scenario, the scenario two where you would accept the offer, but you've left the door open for, hey, I really want more and, and you sort of ended up somewhere in the middle or maybe they've said, oh, I have to run this by the VP of engineering.

I'll get back to you you might want to end that conversation by saying I look forward to hearing back, sorry, this, it's not, it's not this. You might want to, you want me to end that conversation just saying, I look forward to, you know, hearing back. Thank you. You know, thank you for, for talking to the VP of engineering on my behalf. I can, you know, I'm looking forward to hearing back and you know, tomorrow and again, you want to just keep a tight communication link and see what they come back with. Often people will be told this is unfortunate, but I just, the number of times I've heard a recruiter, someone say, we don't make exceptions and we can't go that high. We can only do this. We don't make exceptions and then a candidate, you know, ends that immediate conversation.

Well, this role is at the top of my list, I'm really interested, but I'll need to think about 150 get back to you tomorrow 24 to 48 hours. And then lo and behold the next morning, the recruiter calls them and says, you know what, we made an exception, you want to leave that door open because, you know, it's not like I don't, I hate the fact that exceptions exist. It's just, it's, um, it's not fair to the candidates who don't have this sort of preparation that said if there's gonna be exceptions, why not you? Um, ok, so that brings us to this, this last scenario where, what if at the end of this call, uh, conversation, the offer is below uh what you would accept. You cannot leave this conversation just telling the recruiter, uh, you know, this looks kind of good and I'll get back to you. I have to think about it. The recruiter is gonna, is gonna end, you know, they, they, they leave that conversation thinking, I hope you make a positive decision. I guess I'll see what happens. They don't know that they have to do more work in order for you to accept.

So, if, you know, at the end of this conversation that you will not accept this offer, and I know it's more complicated than, you know, there's, there's the base pay, there's, you know, there's all these other factors, you know, that you're trying to have these minimums and in different ways, I know it can be a bit more complicated.

But for a lot of people like their minimum is, is meaningful in terms of base pay because that's, that's a pretty big lover in your life, right? So, uh if you know that it's below your minimum, you have to say something. Uh and some and you, this is the one time where you can give away your minimum, you're basically gonna say I would love to join, but I can't at that number, you're offering me 100 and 25. I need 100 and 30,000. You know, is there anything you can do? Can you, is there anything you can do on my behalf? I'd love to see if, if we can make this work because they're gonna have to go do work for you. Another thing you can say is I'm really excited about this role but, you know, whatever it is, 125 doesn't work for me. It's a great statement. Doesn't work for me. Uh, You can use that all over the place whenever you're trying to get uh you know, an employer or a manager or someone to take you seriously and know, hey, this, you know, this is an issue that we need to talk about. Cool. So I'm trying to review. So this is the end of the negotiation session. Uh uh part of the talk, we still have 15 minutes and I do want, excuse me, I do want to go through. I know some of the questions have been on this and that's the those often come up.

I do want to talk about, you know, how do you talk about compensation before you have an offer? You know, recruiters often ask about that and also a little bit about how to ask for a raise. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna dig into that. Um I'm that you guys are asking so many great questions. Please please feel free to follow up with me. I would lo I will I would love to make sure I answer them. Uh If not here, then one on one of course. So let's talk a little bit about compensation expectations. Now, I, I have some videos that go into this in more detail, especially what to do if recruiters or, or, or, or application forms are asking for your current or past salary in some states. That's, that's not legal to ask for that or to make pay divisions based on that. So there, there's, you know, this is a great website, for example, and I'll post my slides afterwards. Whoopsies. Um I'm sure if you Google, you can figure out like what are the laws in your state? And if you're working remotely, then that there's uh some other different situations to consider whether basically whether it's your local laws or the, or the office's laws. Um And the main thing around this is that uh if it is legal and you do have to answer these questions, my recommendation is if you're, if it's in person to, you know, to say there's two things you can do to sort of try to avoid this.

One is to say my current contract does not allow me to disclose this information. And that's very common. I mean, you, you ideally you look in your contract and see if that's true or not, but it is very common for companies to not want their employees to talk about their current pay or their compensation side of the organization. It's actually illegal for them to prevent employees from talking to each other within the organization. Uh More details in this video and in the notes on that video. Uh another thing you can say is I'm, I'm, it's I'm not comfortable talking about that right now, but I'm really interested in this role and, and I want to move forward, you know, can I get back to you and then don't get back to them about it because that's a stupid question.

They should not be asking about your current pay. What they should be asking is what your expectations are. Um And that's a reasonable question because they, and quite frankly, you want to make sure you're not wasting each other's time. Now, uh that said, so I have another video on giving compensation expectations, but let me summarize this for you. The, the main thing is that when you are applying to work somewhere, no one knows who you are. There's tons of candidates. I mean, just let's just make that assumption if you can get referrals, if you have an inside connection, you know, network that obviously helps. It's a great way to get, you know, fast tracked through the process and to make sure you get, you know, that someone communicates with you and doesn't ghost. But for a lot of us, we don't always have that we're the first in our professional networks when you're applying, your number one goal is to get those interviews uh because, you know, that's where you're going to knock the socks off of all your interviewers and really show who you are and they're gonna really want you.

And, and that's actually great leverage by the time you get to a negotiation. So first of all, don't worry too much about this preview compensation, this about sharing these things. Sure you want to try to avoid it. You know, if it's um, here, let me put it this way, by the time you've done your interviews and got an offer, regardless whatever you said up front, it doesn't matter because you can reset expectations. You can say, you know what I've been doing research since then, I've been talking to these recruiters, I've been, you know, a candidate, I've been, you know, thinking about things and here's my new expectations. This is what I'm looking for. You know, it's not great to have.

It's a little bit undermining to, to show your hand at an earlier point, you know, three weeks ago and say that you would be OK with 130 but now you're looking for 150 but it's not the end of the world. It's OK. You know, we're, we're having a human conversation. I've seen that work all the time. So don't stress the, the initial number, but like, yeah, if we can avoid it, that's great, then we don't even have to worry about it. So try to avoid uh just say I'm looking for a competitive offer. Let's see if we can move forward. Um And I'm still researching, I'm, you know, you can sort of qualify and couch things that the next thing is to turn it back on them. Anytime someone asks you for information, this is just a general negotiation, self advocacy technique, turn it back on them and, and get some more information before you give an answer. So if they want, they, if they're asking you for a range and you'll notice, I don't, I'm not a big fan of ranges. I just say put, put the number out there. When you give a range, you're excited about the high number. Companies are always looking at your minimum, right? Like they played this game before. Um but when they ask you for a range, ask them what the range is for this role. You know, what, what do they usually pay a a uh you know, entry level data scientist?

What's that range? And then whatever they say, just pick the, the high number? Oh yeah, that, that sounds great to me. You know, I'm, I'm still talking with recruiters and doing research. But for now, you know, they, they say the range is 100 to 100 and 20 you say great, you know, 100 and 20,000 sounds reasonable. And I'd love to interview because you're just, all you're trying to do is get move forward to the interview. That's why the recruiters are asking this question, they just wanna know if they're wasting their time or not. So, don't get hung up on it. Um And sometimes, uh especially in, in tech and especially in the west coast, they'll get, they'll talk about like the full compensation package because it will include equity and signing bonus and, you know, other benefits or other factors. And so, you know what they might say, oh, you know, we pay our engineers, you know, 250 to 300,000, you know, that that's the size of our package. Great 300,000. That's, that's about what I'm looking for, you know, just pick the high number, it's fine. Ok? And, and this is just to clarify, right? Because you cannot negotiate until you have an offer. Actually, that works for the slide too. You're not negotiating until you have an offer.

When every, when you're a candidate, everything you're doing is trying to move forward, get those interviews and get that offer. You're also uh you're also not really negotiating when you're an employee. So people sometimes ask, you know, hey, can I use these techniques to, you know, ask for a raise? Can I, how do I negotiate a raise? And I'm like, you cannot have a 20 minute video on this. I feel very strongly about this. I've been a manager for a long time and I, I love trying to help my reports understand, you know, what, like how things work what their manager is thinking, how to be successful. It's important to try to level that playing field. Um, there's so many thoughts I have, uh, candidates and employees, but the main thing is that it's a conversation when you are an employee, you do not have leverage because your manager gets to decide what they expect from you and what they're gonna pay you and you basically get to say yes or no, but it's not like you have any power.

Truly, you don't have a real leverage. Now, this is, you know, I like, I'd like to think that as a manager, we can have a productive employment relationship. And uh and that, you know, I've been fortunate and I think many other people find that they can work with their management and leadership to have a really great career trajectory and get raises and get promotions and, and it can be a really nice and productive thing. But you are at the whim of being, you know, in a situation that is productive and healthy, it's not something that we all that we all have that we don't all have that opportunity. So I'm gonna tell you two things. One. OK. Say, yeah. How do you ask? Let's, let's try to have a productive relationship here. The first thing you wanna do is get very specific bullets. This is what I've done. This is how I've impacted the bottom line, the clients, my coworkers, you know, these are, these are some nice things I've done. It doesn't have to be lo uh, uh, long, I mean, it's, it's honestly just bullet points. Um, that's the language of, of leaderships and executives. You're, you're telling your manager what they can use to advocate for you on your behalf because probably you're talking to a middle manager, right? And so give them some bullets, ok?

Um, you also want, when you have this conversation you don't want to be bitter about in the past. This isn't all you guys have been underpaying me for years. This isn't, you know, uh, talking about everyone else and what they're doing. I mean, you can bring up, you can, you can bring up a little bit. You have been doing some research or I've noticed this, but you really want to move forward into being growth oriented, ambitious, forward looking. Hey, I'm, I love working here. I wanna have a bigger impact. I want to grow my career. I mean, at the end of the day, the biggest mistake employees make is they don't ask, they don't tell their manager they're looking for a raise. And so the main thing is if you're bringing it up now, like after your, after you get your self evaluation, it's almost certainly too late as a manager. Usually I've been having these conversations for months, certainly by the time I'm about to deliver like, uh about, uh, performance evaluations, it's like the decisions have all been made the most um like agile I've ever seen. It is when I was like given a budget that I could allocate as I as I wanted. But again, it was still, by the time I'm delivering performance reviews, a lot of times those decisions have been made. Not always, sometimes it's a two step process. It all depends.

But the point is, hey, talk to your manager from day one about how do things work here. Um How do I grow my career? How, what is it, what I need to get a promotion? Am I working towards a raise right now? If you're below the midpoint of your range, you working towards raises, like if it's, you're sort of like at the first, if you, you're just in your bar, your, your range, you know, you're working towards a raise and you wanna know, you know, you might, the first step is to tell your manager you want it.

They might be able to work with you on it, especially if you give bullets. But uh the, the good news and the bad news is that it's probably too late when, if you're, when you're asking about it, um if it's already performance review period. But the good news is that you can make a plan for the next six months or a year and you could figure out what are you looking for? What do I need to do? Ok, let's check in about it every month and, and sort of make that happen, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. So, um, that's my, my raise conversation. Oh, and then there's this point about leverage, which is, and this is tricky. But, um, sometimes having other offers can be helpful. I've, I've talked with employees where they've come to their managers and said, like, like I'm underpaid, like my coworkers and I, we've looked at things like they, they even know I'm underpaid, uh you know, for whatever reason, systemic racism, misogyny, whatever. Um There's like a real big leveling issue here that needs to be adjusted. And the manager is like, I can't do anything. Like I can't, like we have policies that, like, I can only do whatever percent raises on review periods.

But then if someone comes with a, another offer and say, hey, I've got this offer to go work somewhere else for another, you know, for a $20,000 increase suddenly, you know, the next day they've, they've got a $20,000 25,000 dollar raise. That's some places, uh at the extreme, other places at the extreme, you tell your manager you're looking elsewhere and they're like, oh, you're disloyal, like you're out of here or, um, you know, or they just start giving the, they, they stop investing in you, they start giving the nice growth oriented work assignments to someone else, you know, that sort of thing.

So you kind of need to know what your relationship is like and what the policies are like where you're working before you bring this up. But that said getting other offers can be helpful and it can also just share, you know, it can also tell you you try to get other offers and maybe you realize things are actually pretty good where I'm at. That's, you know, that information could be helpful or you get other offers whether or not you take them, you know, that might give you some some confidence so that you, you know, feel more comfortable standing up for yourself saying no at work, uh letting people know when things don't work or what you're interested in doing.

So I hope that is helpful and uh I know we only have a few minutes. Um but I want to thank everyone for coming to this talk and for sharing and having a really wonderful chat conversation that I'm gonna have to look at later. Um But uh you can find more about the this material. Um I'll also interview prep. I do a lot of technical and non technical live interview practice and roleplay and giving tips. You can find all that on youtube candidate planet.com. And of course you follow me on linkedin or sign up for our email newsletter at Dangor men.com. We, we share our updates there as well and if you have any specific, if you're a candidate or, or even an em, an employee uh encountering a specific situation and, and want some help. How do I, you know what questions do I think an interviewers are gonna ask? Or you know, what, what num what, what should I ask for in this negotiation? How do I, how do I write this self? A vow? Um I'm always happy to help. So please uh send me a line. Thank you. Thank you so much, everyone and I hope you enjoy the rest of this conference. I'm just gonna leave the slides up. Um I guess I'm gonna answer questions. I don't know if these go late or not. Um Please share these.

Um I think there will be a video and I, I'll share those and please please share that with other candidates who could, could um stand to get a little bit empowered uh and feel more confident. I always appreciate that. Thanks everyone. Um Please reach out. I'll, I'll let you know what, I'll just answer questions, one on one and those, maybe some of those I can make some more videos, uh you know, anonymous videos just to share that advice with more people. If certain questions come up a bunch. Thanks again. I hope you all have a wonderful rest of this conference.