Hacker News Reader

Comment by awinder | Hacker News Reader

The amounts of money never made any sense to me that some hiring managers will die on a hill over. In time I came to the realization that it’s very important for some people to have that “win” / upper hand in the new relationship, as like a tone setting sort of thing.

View on HN

That's an incredibly cynical take. As a hiring manager, I want to stack my team with the best employees we can convince to join our company. Obviously, throwing more money at the candidate is the easiest way to convince someone to come on board.

However, the company doesn't have infinite money to pay candidates. Compensation comes out of our budgets. The more we pay each person, the fewer people we can hire overall. This is fine if you're really hiring someone with above-average productivity at above-average compensation, but it becomes a problem if you're paying above-average rates for average productivity.

Higher compensation cuts both ways, though. If an average candidate is demanding above-average pay, why would I go through all the work of getting authorization for higher pay just to hire an average candidate? If I'm going through the trouble of getting approval to increase the pay for an open job position, you can bet I'm going to search for higher performing candidates to match that higher compensation.

Usually, when a junior candidate starts requesting senior level compensation, I just give up and hire a senior candidate instead.

Also, higher compensation comes with higher expectations. Businesses have ups and downs and layoffs are a fact of doing business. When budgets shrink and headcount must be reduced, the first people to go are those with relatively high compensation for their productivity/skill level.

But no, it's not simply about having a "win" over the candidate or making power moves during the hiring process. You have to think of hiring as company vs. the entire candidate pool, not just yourself vs. the hiring manager.

I think we are talking about vastly different things on re-reading your post. I’m keying in, along with the parent, on offers being negotiated at figures like less than 5% on base salary (sometimes far less. talking 5-10k range)

> I’m keying in, along with the parent, on offers being negotiated at figures like less than 5% on base salary (sometimes far less. talking 5-10k range)

Right, but remember that you're not pivoting around the initial offer number.

The hiring manager is pivoting around their budgeted range for the position. If they already offered 20% more than expected to hire someone and that person comes back requesting an additional 5-10K bump, that could put them 25% higher than expected.

Generally speaking, the people playing hardball to get an extra 5-10K are the same people aggressively negotiating the base salary number. I've given people offers for the exact salary they requested, only to have them come back and request another 5-10K just because they're intent on negotiating more at every step.

Candidly, it starts to become easy to spot the aggressive salary negotiators. Many of us current managers grew up reading things like patio11's negotiation guide back in 2012, and we're basically experts at spotting people using it against us now. When aggressive negotiators come along without an obvious BATNA, the easy method is to offer them 5-10K lower than your final offer and let them "negotiate" back up to your target number. The hiring manager wins the negotiation, but the candidate gets to feel like they succeeded in the negotiation. Happens more than you might expect.

The prevalence of this behavior makes negotiating more important... the company is lowballing you so you have to take what’s on the table.

In my experience the focus is often on the budget and the potential employee but one overpriced employee can demotivate everyone doing the same work for [far] less. I think my current employer lost 50+ people worth of productivity by hiring a single lazy guy for 150%. The team spirit just evaporated then the effect propagated to other locations.

(what theptip said below)

That is how negotiating works. The candidate probably had other offers that were higher. Are they supposed to take your offer just because you were first?

And thus the cycle keeps going. As long as people suspect the hiring manager will offer a lower offer vs whatever market rate is, we will be in this mess of hardball negotiations (and you will lose everytime if you're competing against Netflix and any company intent on paying fair market value ).

Why not just offer the top range and be clear with the candidate that it's the top? If the candidate has a competing offer for more, it means you're paying below market rate and you should address that problem as a business.

> That's an incredibly cynical take. As a hiring manager, I want to stack my team with the best employees we can convince to join our company.

> Usually, when a junior candidate starts requesting senior level compensation, I just give up and hire a senior candidate instead.

I think the cynical thing here is not the take but the company you're working at. You use the weasel phrase of "the company doesn't have infinite money to pay candidates" but that just papers over the real elephant in the room: the correlation between what you pay candidates and how much value they generate for the company. If ICs are a cost center, then of course you'll treat them like commodities and try for min-risk rather than max-upside.

And then you'll lose those great junior candidates to companies like those I've worked at where they rocket up from junior -> mid level -> senior -> manager -> director in the time it might take for junior -> mid level at your company. Now if you were that junior candidate, is it a good idea to work at your company or should I assume that your company frankly isn't that compelling and as a savvy candidate I should bet on a better horse and a better jockey?

There's nothing cynical about saying that. But it will look cynical from your perspective.

The argument I was given by my mentor on this subject is:

If you allow candidates to negotiate, then the employees of equal caliber who don’t negotiate will earn less, and this will cause angst when (not if) they compare their comp bands.

Allow candidates to tweak their package by moving value around between the buckets for cash comp, equity, vacation, etc., but keep the total comp determined narrowly by your assessment of their level.

I don’t fully buy into this principle for startups (since leveling is really difficult without a large population to compare across) but I think this is a less cynical explanation for why a hiring manager might not negotiate at all. It’s a slippery slope.

I'm not very good a social cues and I miss alot, but I've slowly learned that this is often revealing some inherent biases. The managers are ok with paying other white guys, but they are surprised when the meet me in person. I have a white name, but I'm clearly not white. I'm Hispanic, but I'm often told I look Asian, "Filipino", or "Samoan". I think there is some weird internal lens that people are seeing me through.

I kinda flipped through some of your other posts (stalked! sorry), I’d totally believe that this happens. It sounds like you’re working for maybe smaller outfits? I’d consider asking during early hr interviews about what the company does around pay equality, but I come with 0 experience so this might just be terrible advice. One of the better things I’ve seen is that there are orgs starting to take this seriously, and who will make big adjustments when something not right has happened. This is, I’m sure, something that has to be regionally adjusted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com