By Jeff Altman, Big Game Hunter
Jeff Altman, Big Game Hunter explains the dirty little secret of working with a recruiter and how to negotiate salary when you’re represented by a recruiter.
The easiest way to negotiate a higher salary for yourself
Hi, I’m Jeff Altman, Big Game Hunter, and I want to talk to you about negotiating salary when working through a recruiter. Now, most of the time, I’m a huge advocate of working with a recruiter to find a position. Why? Frankly, there are a few things.
The relationship with the employer facilitates your onboarding, and secondly, it’s easy from your perspective. After all, they’re going to be handling all of your schedule, handling all the irrelevant bullshit, and taking it away from you, and your inexperience may distract you from looking at your employer the way you should. But there’s an interesting dynamic when it comes to salary negotiations, which is that recruiters smell blood in the water, blood is their destiny, and their job is to close the deal.
This is true whether you are a retained executive search firm or a contingency executive search firm. The company that was retained would very politely say, you know, well, they’re not even going to fix the problem. They’ll think it’s nonsense, but you know, everyone works to make a living, and that’s not social work.
So ultimately, they’re trying to close out hiring and fill that position like an emergency company would. Therefore, the tendency is to push and intimidate candidates very well or very aggressively into accepting what the employer is offering. I hope that’s not true, but, you know, the statistics tell me that.
Not how I work. I do try to match financially, but most recruiters don’t do that. After all, at the end of the day, you are the only deal they will be trying to do with this employer for many years to come.
Therefore, their natural tendency is to try to exploit you, not the employer. Now, when you’re working through a recruiter, just like when you’re negotiating directly with an employer, it’s important to understand what your true value is. Now, sometimes your numbers may be wrong.
Now you’re talking to friends who are just jumping the gun and don’t actually have any data. Therefore, you need to understand your data and understand that the data reflects a range. So, let me give you an example.
The job you are looking for is 130 to 150 or 60 to 70,000 if you are a lower level individual or 4 to 425 for a higher level individual. Okay? It’s human nature to only listen to the top number. 70,000, 150, 425, and then focus on that number and if you get a dime less, you can say, hey, why didn’t I get all the money? After all, that’s what I’m worth.
The Second Easiest Way to Negotiate a Higher Salary
At the end of the day, you want to be in that range and you want to push it as high as possible. So, when you’re working with a recruiter, you have to say something to him or her, like their performance was a little low and frankly I’m disappointed and I have other things to do that are going to be better than this. Why don’t you go back and see if they improve it.
They’re going to try to investigate more, and from their perspective, if the emergency recruiter is panicking, the retained recruiter, I wouldn’t project that on them. I’m simply saying that they are going to try harder to push employers to increase that number. Without that, you’re basically stuck with recruiters, headhunters, headhunting professionals who are trying to push you into that numbers box rather than trying to get them to diplomatically push back against the employer.
If you adopt this strategy, you need to be prepared to get out of the situation. I want to be absolutely clear on that because they might say she won’t accept it or he won’t accept it unless you pay. You know, in the case of senior management, I said 425 from day one, you know, their score was 415.
I believe my value is 425 and I will make the ten thousand dollar difference for them many times over the course of my work. If they don’t see the value, then it’s not the right place for me, so you’ve challenged me to say, unless they call my number, I’m ready to walk away. Eight out of ten people will reach this number.
If they don’t, then they’re stupid, and you don’t want to join a company full of stupid people. For those looking for this job between 130 and 150, if you zero out 150, you’ll make 125. You may not hit 150, but you have to push them a little higher.
So, you go back to the recruiter again. The same goes for $60 to $70,000 jobs. You go back to the recruiter and say very calmly that they are a little short on time.
I have other things to deal with. It’s a market that I can land in and I’d prefer it to be there, but, you know, if they don’t take me seriously enough, then I’d be happy with the next place they talk to me. By doing this, you will force them to earn checks and earn fees.
This is Jeff Altman. Hope you find this video helpful. If you did this and you’re watching it on YouTube, please share, leave a comment, hit the like button, do something to let people know it was worth it.
Then, visit TheBigGameHunter.us. Watch my videos, read my content, listen to my podcasts, and download free copies of some of my books. Pay them what you want. I shouldn’t say it’s free.
I prefer that you pay a bit for them, but if you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it. So there’s a lot of content out there to help you find a job. So, visit TheBigGameHunter.us and start exploring.
Also, I’d like to encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn. My page has LinkedIn.com forward slash IN forward slash TheBigGameHunter. I accept connection requests from people all over the world unless you are a third party recruiter or located in a country known for scams or spam.
Finally, if your current company is hiring, please email me at the address below. Let me know who to contact and if I should mention your name. I’d be happy to help you secure your employee position.
This is Jeff Altman. Hope you have a nice day. careful!
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About Big Game Hunter Jeff Altman
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