Hi Nie!

By now you've heard me say that you should not share your salary expectations during your interviews. It's sort of my personal mission to make sure everyone knows about The Dreaded Salary Question because it's where folks make the most common and biggest salary negotiation mistake.

But what if it's too late? What if you already told them your salary expectations?

Here's a question I find in my email inbox pretty often:

Here's another version of it:

And another one:

So how do you recover if you've already disclosed your salary expectations?

​

(Watch my answer on YouTube with the link above, or keep reading if you prefer text!)

As with most good questions, the answer is "It depends..." In this case, it depends how early you are in the interview process when you catch this mistake:

1. Early in the process—You haven't started your formal interviews yet
2. Late in the process—You already have a job offer

1. You haven't started your formal interviews yet

There's still time!

The problem you need to overcome is that most companies start by thinking, "What's the minimum we need to offer this person to get them to take the job?"

Unfortunately, they have a simple formula to find that "minimum" number they need to offer: your salary expectations plus a little more to entice you to make the leap.

You want to switch their thinking to, "What do we have to offer this person to convince them to take the job?"

See the difference?

In the first one, they're looking for the smallest number they can get away with. In the second one, they're looking for a number big enough to convince you to make the leap. These are probably two very different numbers.

How you change their thinking

At every stage of the interview process, your primary goal is to tell a story about how their company will be better with you on their team. Just keep telling that story over and over again.

Every time they ask you a question, think, "How can I answer this question in a way that adds another chapter to the story about how their company will be better if they bring me on board?"

If you do change their thinking from "minimum number" to "number big enough to be persuasive", they may forget that you told them your salary expectations and focus on making a compelling offer instead.

That may be enough to break away from your stated salary expectations, but what if you try this and still get an offer that's based on that information?

2. You already have a job offer

You may have experienced something like this:

You got a job offer, and felt great because it was more than you were currently making. Then, a few minutes later you thought, "Wait a minute. This offer is just my current salary plus 5%! Is that a coincidence?"

Nope, it's not a coincidence :(

Once you get this far, it's much harder to recover and drastically improve your offer. But you have a couple options based on your own assessment of your minimum acceptable salary:

1. If a counter of 10-20% above their offer is above your minimum acceptable salary, then that's your best move. You could negotiate more than your minimum or you can fall back to your minimum as your line in the sand (your walk away number).
2. If that won't work, you can use this technique to negotiate a lowball job offer—ask them if they can make improvements to the offer so you can consider them. This is your way of letting them know that they need to switch their thinking from "minimum" to "most convincing".

Your options are slim, but you do have options even if you've already made the most common salary negotiation mistake!

Have a great week!

Josh