Salary Negotiation Q&A

Question: In employment negotiations, is it fact or fiction that employees will always bid high while employers usually bid low?

Answer: If you think about it, such a statement basically violates every negotiation principle that will get you a long-term employee, a process quite different than buying a car. Here are some good rules for negotiating with prospective employees:

Do your homework. Look at what other companies are paying. Go onto job posting sites, monster, vault, headhunter.net and see what your competitors are offering. Also, go to salary.com and wageweb.com for detailed salary information.
Know what your alternatives are. Do you have alternatives? Can you hire others with similar backgrounds? Can the job be modified? Can you shift responsibilities to others?
Think interests, not positions. Don't get stuck on principles that may or may not make sense, you need to be flexible!
Create mutually beneficial situations. How can you come to a win-win solution?
Separate person from problem. Look at what you are negotiating and understand why.
Insist on objective measures. Be careful not to fall into a trap of "I like this person, so I will do this..."

Question: When a prospective employee asks for a concession such as flextime, what is an appropriate response?

Answer: This answer depends on your organization. Does your corporate environment support such flexibility? Has flextime been requested by current employees and been denied? With concessions such as flextime, you don't want to risk losing current staff by trying to accommodate a potential employee. You also want to be careful before hastily setting a precedent that will come back to haunt you later. The time when you are hiring a candidate may not be best time to make policy decisions that you will have to live with for a long time. You really need to look at the total picture and evaluate the pros and cons of what such a change can mean to your organization in both the short-term and the long-term.