salary negotiation

[econophile]

I'll be starting my first real job in the fall, so I've been looking into salary negotiation. For anyone with a regular job, good salary negotiation skills can pay huge dividends. Increasing your base salary by even a few percentage points can create a windfall, since you get to earn that extra bit year after year, and subsequent raises will be calculated off of a higher base.

If you google "salary negotiation," you'll find plenty of results -- so many in fact that you might not be able to tell the good advice from the bad. I've done a little reserach so far, and picked up a few basics tips that seem reliable. I even found an entertaining, althought far from comprehensive, thread in OOT (link).

Before going further, I should say there are two main types of salary negotiations. The first type deals with new job offers and the second type concerns raises at your current job. I'll be talking about the first type, but I hope others can give advice on the second type.

Here are a few pieces of advice about negotiating salaries for new jobs that I have found in multiple sources.

1 - Don't talk salary until you've already got the job. Waiting to talk about salary is good for a few reasons. First, talking about salary early in the interview can come off as rude and decrease your chances of getting a job offer. Second, if you have a good interview, the employer will have a better opinion of you at the end than at the beginning. You want to talk about salary when the employer wants you the most. Third, you might learn important details of the job during the interview process that change your idea of an acceptable salary for the job.

2 - Let the employer make the first offer. If you make the first offer, you risk either pricing yourself out of the job, or naming something a lot lower than the employer is willing to pay you.

3 - Pay attention to benefits. Benefits include vacation, bonuses, health insurance, 401k plans, and other perks. Often these account for a sizable portion of the total compensation package's value. And the company may have more flexibility on benefits than on salary.

4 - Find out the typical salary for the job and location. Usually the employer has a salary range in mind for you. The more you know about the range, the more likely you are to end up on the high end. "What Color is Your Parachute?" says that a good way to determine the salary range for your job is to find out the salaries of the positions just above and below yours. You can find this type of information on lots of salary websites.

That's the basic stuff I've found so far, and it seems like good advice. But there are still a lot of things left uncovered. For instance, what are the best negotiation tactics? How do you best take advantage of multiple job offers? Will you damage your career by negotiating too hard? And then there is the whole subject of negotiating raises.

I hope people will share advice based on their own experiences.