42 Minutes of $10m Salary Negotiation Advice (From A Sr. Director In Tech)

I've been able to negotiate over two million dollars a year in Tech offers I'm going to show you what I've learned over the years of negotiating the fact is that when someone fails that negotiation it usually comes down to not understanding this formula salary negotiation actually happens before interviewing and the way that I prep is that things that are not negotiable now can become negotiable later so the first thing that happens during the recruiting call is that they ask you about your salary expectations and of course for this a million times I didn't negotiate my

first offer but my first negotiation gave me a hundred thousand dollars more and I've been able to increase every single time since then to over two million dollars a year but I'm not some sort of Super Genius I just learned from people who are smarter than me and learned from my mistakes over the years I've been super fortunate to be able to learn from a VP of meta of director at Google people who are in The Executive Suite of large fast-growing startups executive recruiters who have seen many of these negotiations over the years and have

a lot of data Venture capitalists as well as people who negotiate mergers and Acquisitions deals for big tech companies so shout out to all of the people who've helped me over the years I'm going to try and distill the things that I've learned over the years so that you can use them in your next negotiation and not make the same mistakes I did I'm Colin Wade I'm a tech executive who's worked in Silicon Valley Seattle New York this is useful to you please like this video for the algorithm so many more people can get value

from it or share it directly with someone who's about to look for a new job and I've made a lot of mistakes I even made mistakes in my last negotiation every single time I've reviewed how I've done negotiation I've realized that there was more money on the table so of course a lot of people ask me why negotiate there's a big payoff over the course of your career as you saw with mine it's really hard to move your pay up after you've got into your role especially at the big tech companies it can take years

like two three four years to get your next promotion and your bonus and your raise for your salary every year is based on whatever your starting salary was when you got into the role there's no time when you have more leverage than when you're first starting at a company and getting your first job offer it also compounds over time and not just just the salary compounds of our time but you get better each time you negotiate so when those big ticket negotiations happen later in your career you're going to be way way better at doing

it but here on a lot of forums but I negotiate and it didn't work so nobody should negotiate but the fact is that when someone fails that negotiation it usually comes down to not understanding this formula in order for negotiation to be successful the other side needs to like me think I deserve this amount of money justify it internally this is a huge one and also think you're winnable so you need to be likable so if you're a jerk you're not going to get a negotiation done they need to think you actually deserve it so

you are going to have to argue and justify your side of things and you're going to have to do really well with the interviews they're going to have to justify it internally and I'll talk a little bit about how you can help them do that but they also have to think you're winnable so if you negotiate too hard or you bring in a counter offer that's too high they might think you're not winnable and not try and negotiate at all I got this formula from DPAC moleculture from Harvard Business School and I don't usually like

using professors for my Frameworks but here has worked with a lot of top Executives at big companies and negotiations and some of the parts of this formula actually conflict with each other for example as you're negotiating up your offer from the first offer to the time you sign they're gonna like you coming out the interviews at the beginning but as soon as you start questioning whether they've actually valued you the right way and questioning the offer they gave you they're going to question whether they like you as much but by the end of it if

you did the negotiation really well they should like you even more and be super super enthusiastic to have you on board as a hiring manager the way I think about is I actually feel better about catching that big fish who is a bit of a struggle versus catching a bunch of minnows really easily if I nab someone after a really good negotiation with them I usually feel way better about the hire especially if I respect the way they negotiated and I get this perception that they're more valuable than I thought they were when I first

gave them that first offer of course when I say I'm making people like me or think I deserve it who are these people first there's the recruiter that's obvious this is your liaison this is the person who's gonna speak on your behalf internally at the company and you need to have a really good rapport with your recruiter however the recruiter isn't the only one that makes the decision is definitely not the one who's going to make exceptions for you the hiring manager is your future boss and this person can be an amazing advocate in the

process which I'll talk about later the other person is the skip manager who is your boss's boss or the executive that owns the budget where you're going to fall under if you have interactions with this person you're able to get them to be on your side and make even bigger exceptions to going outside the Pay Band and then finally there's usually either a compensation committee especially at the bigger companies like Google and the rest of fang or just someone in finance who manages the budgets and manages the compensation and they work with HR to figure

out what's an improvable compensation and as you get to smaller companies it's much more flexible at the bigger companies you have to be a bit more intentional about how do you justify internally to this compensation committee why they should make an exception but it happens literally every week so salary negotiation actually happens before interviewing and the way that I prep is I make sure that I have a strategy how do I line up what offers I want to get what time how do I make sure that I'm prepping for the right interviews at the companies

that may not be my very Top Choice before I go into the Top Choice companies how do I make sure that I have enough of an alternative so that I have some sort of internal or external leverage for my negotiation that type of strategy is really important as you go into this then I make sure I do my research I set internally for myself an anchor and a target number that I want to go for and whether I care about Equity or cash more in that specific point of my career and then finally I make

sure that I have a template script and then I mock negotiations going into these things a lot of people spend so much time hours and hours dozens of hours hundreds of hours even preparing for interviews doing leak code or doing PM interview exercises and they don't prep at all for doing their actual negotiation which can make a huge difference in salaries you're talking about fifty a hundred thousand dollars a lot of people will say what does leverage mean what does an alternative mean I don't have a milliona offers I'm not like you let's talk about

leverage you might hear the term baton or best alternative to a negotiated agreement but all this really means is what's your next best choice and are you willing to walk away the thing you want to do with Leverage is avoid desperation at all costs so like in the worst case scenario you got laid off and you have 30 days 90 days to leave the country because you're on some sort of Visa that expires in that case all you can do is control your emotions during the negotiation you may not have a lot of Alternatives and

you may be settling for a stopgap job but doesn't mean you can't command a little bit more money depending on the market conditions now research has shown that the best correlated predictor of how much money someone's gonna get paid when they get a new job offer is based on their expectations going into that of what they're worth and how much they're going to get paid so one of the best pieces of Leverage is actually psychological how much do you expect to get paid before you go into this interviewing process that's going to affect how you

behave in very subtle and hard to control ways that are going to change your demeanor and change the emotions of the other side to help you get a more negotiated agreement sometimes you have to break your frame and I'll tell a story because I had to break my frame when I went first got off offered a director position because there was no levels to FYI back then that had director role compensation data I had no idea how much it could be worth I was able to find out that was worth two or three times as

much as I could have had before so I negotiated for that I got almost exactly what I expected going in then I found out my colleague who got hired a month later actually got 30 more than me because their expectations were higher than me based on their last role so expectations are everything make sure you increase how much you value yourself and it's going to pay dividends in your negotiation if you are in a current job then that's great because you can improve your situation your current job many people have negotiated with from the other

side of the table have told me that they have another offer on the table for a promotion at their current job or maybe they have some vested Equity that's coming up or a bonus that's coming up or maybe they're going to be getting a title change or a new project there are many different ways to create leverage within your current job and for most companies this will work really well and the other piece of Leverage is how well you do in the interview so make sure you're warming up and not doing your top company interviews

first if you can help it but the other thing you can do is apply for get referrals for and make sure you're in the process with bigger high paying companies that are well known and you can use this to leverage against your top choice and specifically you should interview at Fang if possible but I guess it's called manga now thanks to meta so you're going to find yourself in one of three leveraged situations the first one is that you have many counter offers and this is great if you handle it appropriately and if those counter

offers are actually relevant to the person you're negotiating with the second is that you have no other offers but you're actually willing to walk away or stay at your current job and that's also a really good way of negotiating and many people especially over the last year when it was harder to get multiple offers at the same time we're able to negotiate without other offers on the table and the third is that this is your Top Choice you want to be here you don't have any counter offers but you still are able to negotiate and

the way to do that is through your internal framing your ability to use market research and data and by building advocacy within the company with the executives in your hiring manager to make sure you can get what you deserve so before you go into to the next negotiation you have to also do research you want to go to levels the FYI blind definitely not Glassdoor or anything like that super inaccurate this will work for most tech roles your software Engineers product managers product designers product marketing even now I think has some but you want to

make sure that you will get recent data in your location if possible and if that doesn't work you want to try some of these other options and if your company doesn't happen to be on there you want to find similar companies or competing companies so for example let's say you were going to interview at databricks but there wasn't a lot of data on levels there but there might be a lot for snowflake their competitor you can usually use that as at least one data point to support how much you should make at databricks companies are

competing with each other definitely don't want to lose candidates to the other and definitely want to make sure that they're competitive in their pay I've definitely done this in my company I just looked at what is the next industry leading company in my space and use that as some of my market data and this isn't done narrowing enough you can sometimes just talk to other workers at that company or who used to be at that company who can talk openly about what they've seen especially if they're a level or two up from where you are

and then of course there's these third-party recruiting firms they have Market data surveys and lots of recent experience because they're usually in the middle of a negotiation and then of course Venture Capital firms have a lot of salary data helping across their portfolio companies and then executive recruiters also have access to that data and their own proprietary survey data so there are three numbers that you want to develop out of this research the first one is your anchor what is your crazy hard number and if it's making you super uncomfortable it probably isn't even high

enough for you the second is what would you be really happy with what's your target number and ideally that's a top of band number or even above top of band if you want to really stretch you usually don't get to your anchor number the third one is how much do you really value yourself if they give you under this number would you actually walk away from this offer and honestly you have to Value yourself in these negotiation processes unless you really are trying to keep a Visa or need to make a huge career step or

need to just pay the bills the next month and you have no other options like no freelancing nothing else then you need to think about what is your walk away number and these numbers are for you not for the other side they're for you and that these are your internal numbers you're not going to divulge them to the other side you're going to give specific data when necessary when doing counter offers for the other side now when you get an offer how much money you're going to be making in one year over the course of

four years is called total compensation and that's made up of your base salary how much you gain your paycheck every month your equity which is your stock options rsus whatever it happens to be depending if you're in a startup all the way up to a big public company and that's usually vested over four years usually equally but all of these things have exceptions so it's hard to make a video about Google or Uber or a the ideal company or a seed stage startup all in the same time because all of them have slightly different ways

of doing Equity I can probably do a whole video on Equity just for startups growth stage companies and Fang and then the other one is performance bonus this is usually like 15 to 25 percent given base based on your performance and the company's performance every year and so it's important to get your base salary up because your performance bonus is actually based on whatever your base salary is and then there's a sign on bonus and this is usually the sweetener the very last thing that you're going to negotiate during the process it's usually used to

close the gap in your total compensation and it's a check that's usually given right when you start and if you leave the company within let's say six months or under a year because it doesn't work out you might have to give that money back but this is a very powerful tool especially because very few people actually last more than two three four years at a specific company especially today in Tech and you're going to move to many different roles during your career so you do want to make sure that you front load your compensation in

whatever offer you're going to get and then of course there are other things like 401K matching whatever your medical insurance is this can be more or less important to People based on their life circumstances the total compensation isn't the whole value of your offer your offer value is actually made up of your total compensation like we talked about about but also what's your total career value or I would like to call it how much is this your skip prep not just for the next role after this or the next promotion after this but two promotions

after that is this going to fill in the rest of your skill sets so that when you go and apply for that next role or two roles from now you're gonna have the projects the skills and the experience needed to qualify for that next level so you should really be planning this out when you're making your offer decisions of course the title level and scope all matter a lot title matters a little less than scope and level but if you are going to certain companies they do care about title if you go to somewhere like

your manga or fan companies then they actually know based on your scope where you should be leveled and they don't really care too much about your title and the last piece is actually lifestyle which matters a lot is it remote is it in your geographical region is it in a high cost or low cost of living area does it have unlimited PTO or is it only two weeks of vacation every year these things are partly negotiable but they are big factors when when you're trying to decide between multiple offers the main key points in your

negotiation timeliner when you apply and figuring out which companies you're applying to when how you set the expectations for level and title at the beginning your first recruiter call where you can do more of that but also understand a lot about the company and answer the question that they usually give you which is what are your salary expectations you also then can make sure that you lock in the right interview process for the right level and role that you want then you move on to the interview stage where the recruiter may still battle you with

salary questions the important thing to do here is to boost your value by doing well in your interviews then find more leverage and then finally at the offer stage there's the pre-offer stage the offer call you're going to be doing some counters if you have multiple offers on the table and you want to make sure that you build your Advocates to go to back so you can justify things internally let's start with the first recruiter screen in your first recruiting call the recruiter is going to try and start the salary negotiations but this is when

you have the very least perceived value to the company all they know about you is maybe some reference and maybe your resume you have not done interviews you have not figured out exactly what they need from you and told your story so you can increase your value over the interview process this is not the time to negotiate you want to make sure you do not negotiate here do not bring up your expected salary you do not bring up what your past salary is you try to avoid these questions the recruiter wants to make their life

super easy they want to be able to close you they think there's a higher probability of closing you if they can get you to commit to a number that they agree upon and they might want to even weed you out saying oh this person is going to ask too much for this role the problem is if you give them a number and they say hey that's too high from us now you could probably give them that same number at the end of the process once you've got buy-in from the executive buy-in from your hiring manager

you've given them loss of justification you've rocked all of your interviews at the end of the process where then they say this person is actually deserving this much or maybe we need to give them a level bump or a new title and we're willing to give them more money and make make an exception you can't do that in your first recruiting call so during the first recruiting call you don't want to weed yourself out you don't have any leverage you don't have any perceived value to the company make sure you don't negotiate here things that

are not negotiable now can become negotiable later so the first thing that happens during the recruiting call is that they ask you about your salary expectations and of course you've heard this a million times never give them the number first and this is a probabilities thing there are definitely some situations that are not predictable where if you gave them a salary number first you might have anchored them higher than they would have anchored you and maybe you would have been able to get to a slightly higher number in most situations we're talking about 75 percent

of the time let's say if you give them a number you are really drastically putting yourself at a disadvantage because you might be thinking this number is a hundred thousand dollars more than I made before but for them they might have thought you could have made two hundred three hundred thousand dollars more than you did before and you need to be able to discover their price first what they think is their price and then move them up from there and you can move them up significantly so don't worry about them giving the first number next

instead you want to flip it and find out what their Leverage is just like you have your own best alternative to a negotiated agreement they have their own how long have they been actually looking for this position how important is this position how unique is the role what is their budget are they cash constrained right now are they racing a new round of equity if they're a startup did they just have a hiring freeze or not these things are really important to understand how aggressive you're going to be in the negotiation and then finally you

can negotiate the process you want to figure out who needs to be the approver how much time it takes what are the stages between you starting the interview process to you getting an offer to you accepting the offer and getting a specific equity and salary package approved this is important because you can identify certain players that you can be talking to throughout the process and making your Advocates the other Factor that's really important is what are they considering you for in terms of level and usually this can be one level or two levels that they're

interviewing for and based on the interview process you might go up or down but if this is not the level that you think you're going to get paid need what you deserve and is not the scope you're looking for in your career this is the time to start thinking about maybe I should be interviewing at the level up and it's better to do that before than after the process is over so let's go step by step what if they ask you what are your salary expectations you don't answer you ask for example first you can

couch this by saying it's too early in the process there's so many variables at play and after I learned more about the company and after I interview and after I learn more about the role and the scope of the job I'm sure we together should be able to get to something that's agreeable and get to it yes then you start asking them questions what's your budget and ban for this role and remember companies in California for example are required to give a salary ban however they've fudge this law a little bit in that Google might

have a salary ban but that salary ban is actually comprised of three seller Advance there's the low salary ban the mid-saler band and the top of salary band and they might give only the low salary band as the one that they tell you right then it doesn't mean that within that level that's actually the max amount they want to give you and it's more like from a certain point point of view this is our salary ban because there are exceptions to be made and there's just an extra step in an exception process to be done

to be able to go outside of that band to the higher bands if they're a private company or an early stage startup you might want to ask them how did they value their Equity today and this is a question that you'll probably want to ask later on but can help frame your expectations for how much Equity you're going to get and whether they've over or undervalued their company at the current price for example companies May raise at the top of the market at a certain valuation than all the public market comparables all drop by 30

40 percent but they haven't corrected that and when they're giving out their offer so you're going to actually want to ask for even more Equity to get to what your public comparable offer is going to be then you want to ask them about the process how are the decisions approved and then in some cases you might want to ask them what is your compensation philosophy as a lesser-known company do you try and go after top talent are you looking for people who are really Mission driven what is your philosophy on this and then if you're

really confused you could ask them what are some compare variable levels at meta or Google who are top paying companies and they might say this is equivalent to an E5 of meta and that gives you a really good set of data points that you can go forward with later in the negotiation no matter what they say you probably just want to say I'm sure we'll make something work later now levels really matter levels are a pretty complicated topic thankfully there's levels.fyi to help you understand what levels are at different companies for different roles but figuring

out which level you're going to be interviewing for makes a big difference in your compensation if you look at these levels from meta let's say you come in and you think you should be in E6 and make 625 000 on average then but then you reveal that they're actually concerning you for an E5 position that's 225 000 on average indifference in compensation so in that case you want to make sure that you can justify to them that you should be going for an E6 figure out exactly what they need from an E6 try to get

that interview Loop rock that interview Loop and immediately you've made yourself two hundred thousand dollars negotiating in one conversation the other Factor here is that if you're in E5 it might actually take you one year here to make any impact and then two years and three years to even be considered to move from E5 to E6 now companies have very different compensation philosophies even between Google meta and Amazon there are big differences but imagine how that changes when you go to Airbnb or instacart or an early stage startup there's a huge swath of difference in

how companies think about compensation and then a pretty simple framework is that there are companies that really just want to go bottom of the barrel they'll get some Market data from a third party and they'll say this is the market range for this is how much we should pay for this role and we'll Target the 25th percentile which is the lowest 25 another company might say we want to pay top of market rate which is usually the 80th percentile we'll try and Target on average getting the 80th percentile in this bracket we're willing to throw

a lot of money at people because we want the best talent that's going to matter a lot to us and that changes for the companies by function maybe a company is more product driven and really wants the best product managers another company might be more design driven another company might care only about AI researchers and they're willing to pay them a lot while they pay their other Engineers a little bit less so it makes a big difference between different companies what their compensation philosophy is and that affects more than almost anything else how much you're

going to get paid even if you as an individual and your skills and what you bring to the company doesn't change at all this is why when people say hey what is the fair market value for me as a software engineer or a product manager or product designer it doesn't exist every company will value you differently for example I went out and had two executive opportunities both b2c both had similar Revenue both public companies but the offers range from five hundred thousand dollars to two million dollars and that's like a 4X difference just because their

compensation philosophies were different sometimes if this is a rule that you really want and the company you really care about working for then you might want to try to break their frame this will usually work for smaller companies or new divisions within companies where an executive has a little bit more power but you want to make them realize that paying more will create better retained better Talent attracted to the company and you might actually say hey like I might come to this company because I really of the mission but how am I going to guarantee

that I'm going to be working with the best in class and that we're going to really have a great shot of doing this you need to pay people better to make sure that our team is going to be great so that your company will get even better returns and you really want to work at a company that really respects and values their talent highly and understands that investing in human capital has an Roi if you're in a low value low Roi part of the business then they're going to reduce how much they're willing to pay

you so let's say you're in a customer success role and you go to one B2B startup where all they care about is sales and they don't care about retention then you're not going to get paid as much as if you go to another company that really cares about customer lifetime value another tip for salary negotiations is make sure you get everything in writing it's very common and I've seen this before someone did not get things from writing they had a negotiation they thought they were at a certain level they got the offer they were super

surprised they're like hey why is this offer so much lower or why is the equity so much lower than I thought it was before and then they've asked for more and because they had no proof and the recruiter had maybe misspoken or there's some other miscommunication they had nothing written down it actually reflected poorly on all sides there's a bit of a sour taste in everybody's mouth and negotiation didn't go nearly as well as they wished it had and they did not get that original offer if they had gotten the other side to email everything

to them or if they didn't agree to that email them afterwards see seeing saying hey these are the things we talked about just sending this as a confirmation and the other side had seen it at least to acknowledge it or even replied with a thank you then they wouldn't have had any dispute at the end and this can clear up communication during the process and avoid surprises later so now let's do a deep dive into the interview side of the salary negotiation process now during the process remember they need to like you they need to

think you deserve it they need to justify it internally and they need to think that you're still winnable so goals for interview process you want build rapport with your hiring manager your future boss your recruiter who's going to be the internal person to go to bat for you so if they don't like you trust me No One's Gonna like you your skip manager who can make even bigger approvals happen for you and the entirety team who are going to debrief with the other folks in this group later on you want to score super highly so

they can think you deserve more and be able to justify it internally you want to show your unique value which we'll talk about in a second and you want to signal that you're super interested in this company everyone should go to bat saying hey I think this person not only should come here but really wants to be here they will be much more willing to fight for you in negotiations if that's the case finally you want to be able to manage timelines so make sure that you're lining things up so if you're going to have

multiple offers they line up around the same time or that you're going to have more time to build your case if you get like a promotion at your current job now when I talk about building up your unique value during this process the way the company sees your unique value is actually what you're actually going to produce for them not you necessarily just as a person they think that they're going to get some outcome and they want to make sure that there's a high probability they'll get that outcome so for example if you're a salesperson

you're going to hit certain quota if you're an engineer you're going to be able to upgrade your infra or make sure they avoid some downtime or produce a real really quick rapid experimentation so they can get things done fast or build a really tricky feature and they want to make sure that has a high probability of happening and that's divided by the amount of effort that they're going to have to put into you in terms of training or just monitoring to make sure you do it well times the risk of you not doing it as

well as they hoped or not doing it well at all or you weaving so ways to improve this are to say hey this is my past success and my impact I've done exactly this thing before my last company I've worked in the same Market industry and model or on the exact same Tech before I don't need any non-company specific training here because I've already done that learning myself look at what I've learned in the past and how quickly and hey hiring manager or skip manager here is my six month plan for how I'm going to

actually deliver once I get on the job that reduces risk tremendously for the other side so let's say the interviews go great they're saying hey you're going to get an offer now this is amazing so let's dig into the offer stage so when they think they're going to give you an offer a recruiter might ask you some tough questions even before you get an offer whenever you get a of pre-oper question you want to uncover why they're asking this instead of just wording out an answer because it's not as straightforward as we think it is

for example if they ask if we give you an offer will you accept they're not really asking hey we expect you immediately to accept the offer if we'll give it to you you want to figure out why they're asking that why they're probably asking that is because they want to make sure that you're actually winnable and you're not just using them as a pawn in a greater salary negotiation game with some other company that you're really going to take the offer at if they ask you if we offer this will you accept you might say

hey is that because you want to make sure that this is my top option and yes I'm still really excited about this company and then pause and let them answer and they might say hey no it's actually because we have two or three other candidates in the lineup or it might be because hey like we know that you used to make more your last company where we're we're not going to be able to offer you as much this is useful information that you're going to want to know and so investigating is better than just answering

if they ask you hey are you interviewing anywhere else then you want to handle this delicately to it and uncover wise the real question they're trying to ask here is are you women or are we going to have to out-compete someone and if they ask you the salary expectation question again what will you accept you need to be able to prepare for this and make sure you can counter it and usually it's by allowing them to make the first offer and say we're going to figure things out from there and if you ask them can

you explain a little bit more about why you're asking me that the recruiter might say hey we want to make sure that we're not going to give you an offer that you're going to get scared from because it's too low then you can reassure them that we're going to get to where we need to go because I really care about working at this company in the pre-offer call the goals are making sure that you show your interest provide justification and not a number at this point in time but just reiterate the justification about why you're

excited about the company about why you have the relevant experience all those things I talked about in your unique value pre-signal value so if you are interviewing at other companies you can slightly signal that but not go into too much detail yet because you still have to do the counteroffer stage which is when you will know a little bit more about how you're going to use those other offers the recruiter says hey let's jump on another call they're going to give you the offer so the first thing you want to do is is make sure

you have just neutral reactions when they give you the offer you don't want to be super excited or disappointed to any of the things that they're going to say to you you want to make sure that they give you the details in writing some companies will push back and say we don't give offer letters unless you're actually going to accept but if you tell them hey these things can be really complicated Equity terms can be complicated I want to make sure that everything's on the table and I'm going to go over this with one of

my mentors or with my significant other then please send it to me or you say hey I'm going to write all this up and I'm going to send it to you as a confirmation to make sure that this is all correct then this makes it a little bit easier for you to use it as counter offer evidence later if you really need to next make sure you buy time so you can review it or maybe even get other counter offers ready and some of the best ways to do this are to buy time through getting

more calls with the hiring manager or the executive on the function saying that hey I need to review this with my spouse or my mentor and you can talk about the scheduling that hey I'm gonna need like one two three weeks to do this it's going to be a really big part of my career and I need to make a decision very thoughtful fully and make sure you ask clarifying questions if you say you're giving me 30 000 shares what does that mean options rsues how is that going to invest how do you value it

what's the strike price so many different questions are going to be needed and you want to make sure you get everything in detail and every time they give you a new piece of information that's another piece that you're going to be able to use in your negotiation so for example if they say hey this is a four hundred thousand dollar a year offer but then they're valuing the company higher than you're valuing the company if it's a private company then you might disagree with them on the valuation and be able to negotiate for even more

Equity or more cash new info is powerful because there's a new reason to do a counter and remember once again they need to like you think you deserve it justify it internally and they need to still think that you're winnable so be winnable okay now you've done all that you've talked to your Mentor you want to come back with a counter there's a three-step counter first you want to prep your questions and prep your pitch for yourself again for what is your unique value why you think that you want to get more Equity or cash

you actually want to set up calls with the people who are going to be your Advocates internally your hiring manager and the executive or your skip manager if you're able to come to them say hey here's my six month plan I'm super excited about the role here are the various reasons why I think that I'm going to give you the outcome you want as high probability as you want it and with low risk and low effort on your part then they're going to be much more inclined to be able to do exceptions for you and

you can explicitly ask them at the end of those calls hey I'm going to be asking for more money here can you go to bat for me and then finally you send a counter to the recruiter and you want to remind The Advocates the hiring manager or the skip of your unique value you want to talk about the outcome probability effort risk here's my past success and impact I've done this before I've worked on this Tech before you can ask them what do I really need to succeed on the job so they understand that you're

really engaged in your thinking ahead and you can give them my 3690 or my six month plan for how I'm going to do really well on the job decreasing the risk increasing the probability that they're going to get a great outcome from you and then of course you want to actually asked them to go to bat for you for higher compensation now if you have multiple offers your instinct is going to be let me take this offer and negotiate it against the other offer right away what you actually want to do is take your top

offer and negotiate that up first by itself then take that new top offer take that to the other place get them to beat it and then you want to take that back around to the first offer to get even higher this is actually where you're going to get the optimal gains to your offer but of course during all of this you want to be very careful about what offers you put in front of what companies with what framing you want to stay winnable if you go to an early stage startup with a Google offer that's

higher they're going to say hey there's no way we're going to be able to compete with Google and it's not even a comparable opportunity like we're Mission driven we have high growth etc etc you need to be able to frame the Google offer properly before you go to them so they're not a scared off and B they understand how you're already adjusting the Google offer to be comparable to theirs the other thing you want to know is should I do this over the phone or should I do this via email and there's no perfect answer

I've definitely seen people people say you always do email or you always do the phone but really it's personality dependent and it depends on how much you want to be able to negotiate up so the first option is you can do all calls you can do everything over phone with email confirmations like we talked about this is my preferred method because honestly the Rapport you build over the phone the ability to adjust if people are scared about you being a jerk or just using them as a leverage situation for another offer you can actually adjust

to those situations in real time feel likable be winnable and also increase your ability to look like you deserve the compensation during the calls and restate things in a way you can't do it in an email however a lot of people are just get really nervous they act emotionally even I've done this before I've made really bad mistakes during negotiations just saying the wrong emotional thing on the call and I kicked myself later saying I should have just gone to email and have had to go back to email to actually recover after I've thought about

more and luckily I was able to recover those negotiations but that's not always the case so if you want to go with emails you do go with emails but you need to make sure every email is preceded by some sort of call where you've made sure that they like you they think you're winnable that you have Advocates like your hiring manager and your executive going to bat for you on the back end so when you give the email with all the details everything very well thought out worded properly that they're actually going to interpret that

in the proper way and be willing to engage in the negotiation so what do you do if you get a lowball offer if you're doing a tech negotiation the first thing is you want to investigate why they're doing this specifically you ask them is this how much you think this role is worth or do you think specifically I'm worth this much based on implied injury performance my experience Etc if they say it's about you specifically you can try to move that back maybe get another interview maybe address some of their current concerns directly but those

are all things that are not on the table if you don't ask the question if they say this is what this role is worth then you might have to break their frame and say hey this is the impact I'm giving this is what the market says for this type of role in scope you need to break your frame and adjust your compensation levels up if you're going to really be competitive in this market or you might say hey if that's what you think this rule is worth then maybe I can take on more scope maybe

I can interview for a level up because that's what I think I'm able to bring to the company you might also want to use mirroring or labeling to be able to find out why the team gave you a specific score if you scored less and this is taken right out of never split the difference which is a great book on negotiation by Chris Foss and the way that you might do this with the labeling is say hey if it seems like the team didn't feel I was great for this role or good enough for this

role and that's why you're giving me this lower compensation can we dig into what the team's concerns are can I talk to more members of the team is there something else I can show you to make sure that you understand that I'm actually capable of doing this job and I'm worth this much mirroring is actually just repeating the last few key words they said so if they say hey the offer is 180 000 plus twenty thousand dollars in equity you might say a hundred and eight thousand dollars plus twenty thousand dollars in equity and then

you pause and you wait for them to fill in the blanks they might actually offer up yeah this is our compensation philosophy you did this well in the interviews they'll try and explain away why that number is exactly where it is giving lots of things to be able to counter and that pause is important because it lets them solve the problem for you and if you're trying to make them an exception to going outside the band then you want to actually ask them have you ever made exceptions to this before have you ever paid anyone

more okay tell me a little bit about that that might not be exactly me but tell me about those situations and you might be able to uncover what is actually necessary to get an exception made and use that process for yourself you don't always want to counter with just hey I want this much more money you might want to counter with I think I deserve this much more money but I'm going to do these more interviews to show that I'm worth that much that I'm worth this extra level or hey like I think I should

add this much more scope to my role when I come on board and that's going to be worth this and based on my past experience I really think I can nail this new job at this new scope so when you do the first counter offer you want to thank them for the first offer of course you want to stay winnable you want to stay likable identify that there is still a gap you want to do that short unique value pitch to reiterate how much value you bring to the company why you're low risk and high

probability of giving them a really great outcome and then here I usually like to leave it open but some people like at this point to actually give a number and that's usually their total compensation anchor and then you want to leave it up to them a little bit about how they give you Equity versus cash because internally it might be easier for them to give Equity or cash if you really care about cash then tell them I prioritize cash and you don't really have to explain yourself but if it's a startup that has some sort

of risk for becoming liquid in their Equity then that's something you might want to bring up and then of course during your cameras you can also bring up the fact that hey I might be losing bonuses investing in my last company I'm up for a promotion or I have other offers or interviews in the loop you don't want to necessarily tell them the numbers here if you unless you think it's really going to be helpful you can bring up Market data if you don't have all that and you can talk about the risks of being

in a startup versus Fang for example then they come back with an offer they say last and final et cetera Etc but you still want to be able to do a second counter offer and then again of course you say thanks you want to make sure that you can talk to your Advocates again to go to bat for you to get extra if you really think that you still want to make more and that at this point if you think that you're really Tapped Out on salary and Equity you want to bring in some of

those other elements so you can suggest hey what about a sign-on bonus or what about a one-time Equity boost on top of your actual Equity grant for just one year or a guaranteed refresher in your second year and then sometimes you'll want to counter number three and that's more typical if you have multiple companies bidding on you or if you have some more complicated process to go through or if they're really just not hitting the number you want and you feel like there are some reasonable extra ask for you to do if you go to

counters number four five six unless you're really highly valued like an AI researcher who is coming out of a PhD program right at the top of the AI wave then you might actually risk just decreasing how much they like you enough for them to disengage with the negotiation and then you're gonna have to go into recovery mode which is much harder to do the one thing you want to avoid during this entire process is ultimatums even if you want to walk away do so with Grace because they may actually come back to you later things

might change their budgets might change their second candidate might actually go take another offer and an ultimatum will really just make them think a bit less of you for forcing them into this position and honestly they want to make sure that they're going to hire someone that they really like and respect when they're working with them now one thing that is very effective is a pre-agreement but you want to use them sparingly and what a pre-agreement is when you say something like I will sign if you offer x amount which means that you're saying I'm

not going to counter if you give me another offer and I'm not going to take anyone else's offer I'm just going to sign and usually you want to leave those options open for you especially the signing with someone else or if the other company comes in with a way higher offer and you really still want to work at this company you want to negotiate things up so there's a lower upside but then there is a higher close rate so if you're super concerned let's say there's a market downturn or there is hiring freezes going on

everywhere and you really just want to close the deal then you can use this tactic to be able to make the recruiter feel at ease this is one way to alleviate their concern that they don't want to go through all of the exception process of going to the compensation committee getting more data et cetera Etc to give you a higher offer outside of the normal process if they don't think that you're really going to sign it so this is a great way to do that little final step at the end especially if they're making a

big exception for you so it's very effective to close and usually you'll do this if you're really afraid that you're going to lose the deal but it can limit your upside so you should usually do this after you've already negotiated a bit and discovered their price things to look out for when you're doing a tech offer negotiation a company you use many different tactics here they will try to exhaust you you've come so far they'll use the fact that you've already done these interviews that you're tired at the end you just want to sign you

just want to say hey I'm happy I have a new job thank goodness but you've come this far you've invested so much so just investing a few more sentences a couple more emails a couple more phone calls can make you so much money over the course of your career you might as well invest just this extra little amount at the end it'll make such a big difference second they'll try to use urgency they'll pressure you they'll ask you for answers they'll say Hey you have to give us an offer Acceptance in two days you need

to buy your time back you need not be the decision maker so I need to talk to my spouse I need to talk to my mentor if you have other processes going you need to make them aware at the right time that those processes are going and you want to make sure that you have things lined up properly and you want to also go to those other companies and try and make them accelerate but if you're at a startup which takes two weeks to do interviews and at Google which takes up to 90 days to

do interviews and to get you an offer then you aren't going to line things up properly so you need to be able to make sure that you buy more time and if you're willing to walk away you can buy a lot of extra time they'll also try and play on your desperation so they might come in super low and not want to engage in negotiations with you if they think you're really desperate and sometimes that's just an emotional thing or maybe you let it slip that your Visa is running out or something like that but

you need to be okay with walking away in most circumstances this is useful to you please like this video for the algorithm so many more people can get value from it or share it directly with someone who's about to look for a new job and then of course at the end of this you want to accept your highest value offer that's the offer that has the highest value to you not just total compensation and finally you want to rest and watch the sunrise on a grateful universe and be happy about your new job and if

things didn't go perfectly that's totally fine learn from the things you did well and not well during this negotiation and be ready for the next time you're going to negotiate when it's going to be for an even higher value thanks everyone see you next time