Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door (30 page)

In any job search, the tide can shift constantly and it’s easy to lose track of a negotiation. Your counterpart can skillfully maneuver you into a position where you constantly lose ground and never even notice. Document records of each individual encounter and compare positions constantly to detect if you are gaining or losing ground.

 

 

 

The clouds part. The sun shines. You’ve been offered the job. The brief, beautiful moment in which you can cut the best deal possible for yourself has arrived.

What now?

First of all, return to earth. Don’t let the euphoria of the moment cloud your judgment. If a recruiter is involved, remember, recruiters work for the company, not for you. Resist the impulse to prostrate yourself at his or her feet. Recruiters know how to exploit that reaction, and it won’t work in your favor. Be happy, not ecstatic. Next, let’s get real. Unless you can run a 3.4 forty and throw a football sixty-five yards, you’re at a disadvantage.

Most of the time recruiters don’t come knocking on your door. You knock on theirs. They know you’re panting for the job.

From your point of view, the key is to look at
all
the elements of the package
compared
to your needs.

Now hold that thought: “All” and “compared to your needs” are genuine biggies.

The “all” idea is to eliminate any surprises and disappointments once the marriage is underway. You need to know as much as possible before you sign on. Once you accept the job, there isn’t anything left to talk about. You can’t negotiate anything after you’ve agreed to it.

You’re in the army now.

“Oh, didn’t you know our executives are always expected to turn in time sheets every day?” and “We never, ever allow our people to rent anything but an economy car on the road” and “It’s not company policy to allow severance pay unless we agreed to a severance package with you
before
you were hired. Do you have anything in writing?”

These are not the words you want to hear after you’ve agreed to take the job.

You must have had a few clues that you might be hired before the golden moment occurred. That was the time to do some planning, to map out your ideal package, and to anticipate concessions you’d be willing to make to accept the company’s offer.

Don’t be too hard-nosed. Be polite, smiling, and, at this point, just gather information. Usually, for management jobs, it takes several discussions to nail down the details and generate a written offer letter.

Now here’s the list. The key points that should be covered include:

Make careful notes during these discussions, and be aware of any slippage as the preliminary talks proceed. It’s not uncommon for companies to try to short-sheet candidates they think are really interested in the job or to promise one thing orally and another in writing. Confirm conversations in writing as soon as possible.

Don’t accept the offer until you’ve covered
all
—there’s that word again—the topics on your list. That’s the best single way to maximize your package.

Don’t forget, the secret of negotiating is to negotiate as little as possible. You try to get as much information as you can from the other side while providing minimal information from your side.

Keep that smile working, and if the company starts to backslide, consult your notes and remind it, ever so gently, of what you
thought
you heard before and what you carefully wrote down.

Once you’ve got the offer, the whole offer, on the table, ready to commit to writing, you’re now in a position to discuss the “compared to your needs” part of the equation. This is when you can do some negotiating in the traditional sense. Every company has its own quirky little policies. And so do you.

Your last company, for example, may have provided you with a company car. This one doesn’t, even though it has a substantially better pension plan. Is a compromise in order, fifty-fifty on the car?

Another area ripe for compromise is the title you’ll be carrying in your new position. Conventional wisdom is: Give in on salary, give in on office size, give in on prime locker space at the executive squash courts, but never, ever give in on title.

That’s badly dated advice, and it provides you with an opportunity.

There are more vice presidents around than there are paper clips. If you’re willing to compromise on title, and you should be, you may be the answer to a personnel director’s prayers. With all the downsizing and cutbacks, companies are having enormous compression problems with titles.

Consider downsizing your title as a trading card. It’s your ace in the hole. Don’t throw it away. Hoard it carefully and play it when you need it. It could go a long way toward helping you cut a better deal for yourself.

No matter what the outcome of the horse-trading part of the deal, by using this approach and covering every possible area of employer-employee relations you can think of in your pre-sign-up discussions, you’re way ahead of the game, and you’re way ahead of 99 percent of all hires.

© The New Yorker Collection 2008 Peter C. Vey from
cartoonbank.com
. All Rights Reserved.

Mary Weber Nord grew up in Minnesota and got her BA at the College of St. Benedict and her MBA at the University of St. Thomas. After communications management and investor relations positions with Jostens and Hill & Knowlton, she was recruited by the ad agency Fallon Worldwide in Minneapolis in 1984, staying with them until 1992. She then left for eight years to raise three young sons and was lured back in 2000 for another eight-year stint with Fallon as director of talent resources. Mary morphed from being a PR person to a human resources director and ran this segment of the business for Fallon Worldwide for eight years.

Fallon sold to Publicis in the year 2000. This French-based communications and ad mega-agency is one of the four giant global communications firms and also owns Leo Burnett and Saatchi & Saatchi. For the first few years in the Publicis family, Fallon Worldwide operated with considerable independence, much as it always had. Then cost pressures became more intense, and Publicis encouraged more shared services. Pat Fallon became less involved in daily operations.

In 2008, Fallon conducted a round of layoffs, and Mary Weber Nord concluded it might be time for her to strike out in a new direction. She could see a gradual pattern of reengineering that suggested her position might not have the same level of significance it had when she rejoined the company. The expansive growth energy that once characterized the business seemed to be waning, and the spirit of fun was absent. So often, today’s human resources officer is seen as the “angel of death”—supervising an endless series of staffing contractions.

Mary voluntarily left Fallon and founded Weber-Nord Consulting in St. Paul. After she was well along with her own plans, the recession hit in 2008. Rather than a recipe for disaster, her new venture proved to be a success. What allowed her to do well? The versatility of her skill mix, and her willingness to do a variety of different things:

Mary has taken the multitasking she mastered so well as an agency executive and applied it to managing a diversified series of mini-careers for herself.

Opportunism of this sort only succeeds if you have a diverse mix of skills, and, Mary says, “if you are an accomplished networker who can cobble together the contacts you will need to find opportunities for putting your various skills to work.” Finding the different “channels of opportunity isn’t always immediately obvious.” You have to be willing to paint a fresh self-portrait of yourself, often with a very different paintbrush.

Mary sees her own destiny already taking shape in the lives of her sons. “The oldest is in a medical residency, but the other two are in their early to midtwenties. They’re doing multiple jobs, and they don’t think anything of earning their living through a mix of specialties rather than just a single career. My new mixed career probably suits my life going forward even better. Originally, I regretted not having more specialized technical skills. Then I realized that those skills I did have probably gave me an advantage. Having spent so much time in communications and client services better equipped me than most for these new job realities.”

Baby boomers are up against unique challenges in today’s job world. A loyal reader, Shawn Hurley, clued me into an absolute must read for baby boomers. It’s a study from the The MetLife Mature Market Institute® prepared in conjunction with David DeLong & Associates. The title:
Buddy, Can You Spare a Job? The MetLife Study of the New Realities of the Job Market for Aging Baby Boomers.
Find it at:
http://www.metlife.com/assets/cao/mmi/publications/studies/mmi-buddy-can-you-spare-job.pdf

Get a load of this bombshell: “the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates a 47 percent increase in the U.S. labor force ages 55+ between 2006 and 2016. This means there will be millions of aging baby boomers looking to prolong their careers in the years ahead.”

Those who succeed will match creativity with pragmatism, ready to compete with totally fresh selling propositions for their talents. If you’re in this age group, don’t let another moment pass before you tackle the implications revealed in
Buddy, Can You Spare a Job?

 

 

 

Asking for a raise can be more traumatic than the first day at the beach in a bathing suit after a long winter of hot fudge sundaes.