Job Offers and Self Valuation

I've had a number of job offers over the years that came in well under my target or even minimum requirement. While there are a number of reasons for this, it is nearly always humbling.

On a number of occasions, the low offer is entirely expected and any disappointment minimal. You have an informed, deliberative manager or hr staffer conducting a reasonable assessment of the likely earning power you bring to them against your risk of failure in hire, in order to compute what you are worth to the company. That last part is crucial in that even the correct evaluation is primarily local to the company: what are you worth to them?

You have no intrinsic paid worth. Your paid worth is relative to both the industry and the company to which you are applying. Your market worth is the highest offer you can get (and it will vary). Once we understand this, we gain control over our pay by leveraging what we will bring to each employer.

It is common sense that someone who specializes in product aesthetics will be worth far more to a company such as Apple than to a travel agency which produces very few (if any) material products of its own. An English language teacher is more valuable in a non-English-speaking country than his own. We ought to expect that the more foreign we appear to an interviewer, the lower our perceived value will be to them, and likely the lower our reasonable, apparent value to the company will be.

That is apart from any mistakes they may make in sizing you up or estimating what you may accept. The risk you bring should be carefully factored into their offer. Thus a too-low offer may not be the same as a true "low-ball" offer where a company is banking on your desperation to accept.

There are, too, complications that arise from making the offer too high for an inexperienced candidate. A lower offer with future headroom for growth and performance incentives may be a solid path. It depends on the candidate. For some, offering significantly more (but not excessively) than asked frees up something to just pour themselves into work. For others, being correctly assessed, with the ability to improve and be reassessed, provides the necessary goal-oriented structure for improvement.

For the employee, if you want the highest compensation level, it is reasonable to look for that company where your particular skillset is needed, where you will use much of if not most of your skills in order to succeed. The better the fit, the higher your negotiating power. Wise recruiters or managers will recognize the value you bring, and if not, it will be on you to initially help them recognize what a difference you will bring to them. All of this points back to needing to understand the environment well, before interviewing.

The less of your full skillset you use, the less headroom you have. If you have skills ABCDEF and the interviewing company needs someone with only EF, then your other skills contribute nothing to the negotiation. If ABCD are rare, but EF are common, then your task is harder since you may not compete well against those who only have EF. It is still worse if they ultimately need EFGH, where you will have to develop G and H and ABCD aren't useful. These are concerns in terms of changing careers, or stepping outside of your normal field of expertise. A healthy balance to the need for growth and the need to bring a significant portion of your hard-earned skills to the table may be Lou Adler's recommendation of a target of a 30% increase in all factors (growth, salary, etc.) combined. For my part I usually prefer nearly all of the increase be represented in the higher role, with growth resulting. On the other hand, that can often be a tough sell to companies preferring the predictability of those already qualified seeking lateral job changes.

A reasonable low evaluation is distinguished from both a legitimate budget constraint and the "low-ball" offer.

Sometimes one is simply too expensive and there is no economic path for the company to earn its salary back from your performance if hired. That is understandable. Such places may be excellent work environments for those too inexperienced to command high pay. Here the total compensation, while light on pay, is heavy in experience. Such work can still be highly satisfying for those starting out or effecting a change. I would argue that sometimes such low-paying places are indispensable to a solid career. Where else can you get high levels of experience except where the already qualified people are priced out?

The true "low-ball" offer is of course as well a company's deliberate statement of what you are worth to them, as are a number of hoops to jump through with interviews, formulaic/dated questions, lengthy written applications, and now apparently automated phone interviews. (I rejected my first "invitation" for one such not terribly long ago -- what an awful invention.) A company that doesn't value its employees, won't value its potential employees either or treat their time and energy with respect. The "low-ball" offer is just the end of that potential-hire process. Maybe the manager is solid, but HR has problems (or vice versa) but the net effect is a poor overall effort for the whole company. And it is short-sighted. The very best performers have a sense of what they are worth to the market. If you pay below market, you will in general reap below average performance.

There seems to be increasing talk about whether to in fact value the employees more than the customers for this reason: engaged employees will best engage customers. It sounds foreign. And it sounds right.