Why Negotiating Salary Might Not Be the Best Option
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Here's your money briefing for Tuesday, March 2nd. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. Let's say you finally get that phone call you've been waiting for, a job offer. The base pay is fair, but you think it should be higher. Experts say negotiating salary may not be your best move.
This is one of the most interesting takeaways for me from my reporting, which is that almost every veteran negotiation expert says that salary is the least of your problems and you shouldn't focus on base pay.
Coming up, our at-work columnist Krithika Varagor will explain why millennials, and millennial women in particular, often enter into misguided salary negotiations. And she'll discuss some of the other terms that might be on the table aside from pay. That's after the break.
This podcast is brought to you by ReliaQuest. Cyber criminals are constantly attacking. They want your data. They want your identity. They want your innovation. ReliaQuest fortifies your business with agentic defense, AI that detects, contains, and eliminates cyber threats in minutes. It helps your security team move faster at the work that matters most to protect the business now and delivers insights to help them predict what's next. ReliaQuest, agentic defense for the enterprise. Learn more at ReliaQuest.com. That's R-E-L-I-A-Q-U-E-S-T.com.
What is the episode about and why might negotiating salary backfire?
Many younger workers, most notably millennials, have the idea that they should always negotiate a higher salary. But haggling over base pay could actually harm their chances of being hired. Still, that doesn't mean they should give up negotiating entirely. Our at-work columnist, Krithika Varagor, has been speaking with workplace experts about this, and she's here with us to talk about it. Krithika, thanks for being with us.
Thanks so much for having me.
So there's some survey data showing that it's become more common to negotiate salary before accepting a job, and hiring professionals are even coming to expect it. Why do you think we're seeing this shift?
You know, it's hard to say. I think that it's become kind of a cultural paradigm, especially for millennials and younger workers, that you should ask for more. And according to veteran scholars who've been looking at this for a period of decades, it slowly became more and more prevalent since the 80s and 90s. And one watershed moment in women's negotiation specifically was Lean In, the book by Sheryl Sandberg and this notion that the one way to close the gender pay gap, which is real and still exists in America today, is by women simply asking for more money. And in a really famous survey in a 2007 book called Women Don't Ask, The author of that also found that many fewer women asked for more money at work than men.
So that kind of became a dominant paradigm.
And because we're mostly talking about younger workers, are the sorts of jobs they're applying for entry level? And could that make it less likely that salary is negotiable at all?
Yeah, absolutely. It's clear to anyone who's working for a long time and also through my reporting that the more experience you have, the more bargaining chips you have with salary and everything else. So one of the executive recruiters I interviewed who works with people with 10 or more years of experience says almost everyone at the senior executive level negotiate their base pay and then on the other hand for more entry-level workers you just have fewer cards to play and also it's becoming more of a trend among recruiters to be upfront about salary parameters very early in the interview process so you're kind of agreeing to it in some general sense at every step of the way and you can't ask for a lot more at the end.
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