Need some salary negotiation tips? Try these

On the plane from New Hampshire to California the other day, I had the pleasure of reading the latest installment of Donald Asher’s “Save My Career” column in US Airways Magazine.

(Okay, I’ll freely admit that half the reason I was flipping through the content of the magazine was because both the Sudoku and crossword puzzles had been completed by the person in the seat before me. How often are flight attendants supposed to change out the magazines in the seat-back pockets, anyway?)

Back to the story. Asher’s February article, “The Salary Game,” revolved around the plight of an anonymous 36-year-old female executive, making $80K, who had just found out she was making $62K less – yes, sixty-two thousand dollars less – than a male colleague for doing essentially the same job.

Now, this could be a gender thing, a bad negotiation thing, a company trying to keep every penny it can, or a combination of any or all of these. But while the gender thing is more of a macro discussion, we can at least address the micro – the tactics of negotiating salary.

I’m not going to reveal Asher’s tactics here – honestly, it’s worth the click through to read it yourself. He suggests multiple deflective responses to employers asking you your salary requirements during the interview process, and I laughed more because of his awesome suggestions than my fellow airplane riders did to the in-flight movie. (Lars and the Real Girl, since you wondered.)

His point: Save honest-to-goodness salary negotiation for the one time in the hiring process when you have the power – when they say they want you, and make you an offer:

Then, when it comes to actually negotiating the terms, be nice but firm. Appeal to market rates, which you know from your prior research. The pertinent number is not what you earned before, but what it would cost them to hire someone else besides you. That’s the market rate.

(As an aside, USAirwaysMag.com seems to archive their issues online, which is great news – you can dive deeper into Asher’s writing. Not every inflight mag offers their content so freely online.)

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