Salary Negotiation

Salary Negotiation is never fun, but this two step process from Julia Philips on the 4 Business Networking blog is sound advice. The only problem is the way she casually mentions checking Google to find out the salary range for the position type and experience level.

• First this is not easily achieved by a Google search...
• Second, you also need to account for your geographic area.

I have mentioned before several web services for salary searching. I have also talked about America's Career InfoNet, which is a subset of Career One Stop. The ACI is a nice site with a usable interface for BLS data. You can use it to find your job/title and your zip code; and then get high, median and low salaries for both annual and hourly rates. Factoring in experience can be much more difficult. The typical method suggested by many career counselors is to peruse job ads, but my problem with that is that most ads don't list a salary. When they do, they give a large range so that it is difficult to judge where you lie on an experience scale.

Now if you are lucky and the place of employment is something like a government position or other job where the budgets are a part of the public record, then you can look the info up online... but if you don't personally know people who hold positions to the one you are applying for (and their personal experience) then it is difficult to use this data. At best you can use it to calculate a local high, median, and low salary.

The morale of this post is, that while I totally agree with the importance to have an idea of an appropriate salary before beginning the negotiation. It is not just a simple Google search away. I hope my tips are useful for those of you preparing for such a negotiation.

Good Luck All.