- Career growth requires choosing the right company, team, and manager in addition to your own effort. Every candidate should have an answer for:
- How do you know
- This company is on a growth trajectory?
- This team within the company is influential/important?
- This manager will support you and has the influence to do so and help you grow?
- How do you know
- Candidates don't do enough due diligence to identify these environmental factors.
- Switching costs are much higher for an employee than for a company.
- Companies negotiate to get your salary expectations
- Challenge: What should you say so the company shares numbers?
- Companies negotiate to get your counter offers
- Challenge: What should you say without sharing counters + how do you use them to negotiate?
- Companies negotiate your offer deadline
- Challenge: How do you identify when offer deadlines are real or a tactic?
- Signing bonus in the form of salary
- Level and seniority
- Travel stipend to visit significant other
- Negotiating vesting schedules of equity
- Retention bonus
- Car allowance
- Student loan payments
- Clauses in equity agreements (exercise window, option type, triggers, etc.)
- Severance
- Immigration support
- Paid Grandparents leave
- Recruiters are not the decision maker
- Candidates are negotiating against a team:
- Compensation Analyst/Team: Decides on the actual offer amount and any changes
- Hiring manager/Team: Understands the candidates business value and makes the hiring decision
- Focus on this person.
- Recruiter: Advocate for the candidate and act as communication between candidate and the company
- Agency recruiter: Serve their customer (the company) to fill hiring quotas
- Recruiters do not rescind offers, hiring managers do
- Offer rescinds are so rare that if it occurs, the company was not invested in you or has a "shut up and code" culture.
- There are two key ways to avoid losing an offer from negotiating.
- How you communicate matters
- "I expect a compensation of $$ 450 \mathrm{~K} /$ year" vs. "My understanding of my market value is that it is $$ 450 K /$ year"
- has an effect on the manager's perception
- always offer explnation instead of saying things that sound as demands.
- If the managers perception is already very positive then there is also more margin for error for communication.
- "I expect a compensation of $$ 450 \mathrm{~K} /$ year" vs. "My understanding of my market value is that it is $$ 450 K /$ year"
- Don't Negotiate When There's a Close #2
- The likelihood of a manager rescinding an offer is based off of:
- Are there second choice candidates that are as good?
- How many is he/she trying to hire?
- What has been your relationship with your manager?
- Ask how you compared to the other candidates and if there were any close #2s. If there were and they are only hiring 1. don't negotiate.
- The likelihood of a manager rescinding an offer is based off of:
- As an individual contributor, I would reject any offer where you haven't been able to meet your manager
- because the manager dictates the experience and growth.
- Exploding offers - offer where deadline
$<=48$ hours- Shows the your value to the company.
- When compensation gap is greater than $30K/year in base
- Shows a difference in your expectation and company's.
- Negotiation Tactics and Strategies
- www.teamrora.com/learn
- Webinar @ ICLR 2021
- www.teamrora.com/learn
- www.teamrora.com/blog
- Examples of clients we've helped negotiate offers at FAIR, DeepMind, Google Brain, Amazon, Apple, etc.
- Compensation Data for Al industry
- Don't share numbers in the beginning.
- Ask for their range.
- US v/s EU v/s otehr places - equity and signing bonus is similar but base salary differs.
- internships are useful
- thumb rule between equity stake in a startup and size of the startup?: nope, higly variable
- how reliable is levels.fyi in evaluating offers? - not very