赖小琪
This week we conducted a salary negotiation in class. Actually it was our first time to do the negotiation activity in class, so I felt kind of thrilled. And indeed it was quite exciting.
In the negotiation, I acted as an employee who wanted to seek a job in New York prior to getting my MBA because my fiancé was there. I was intended to work as a product manager in a well known developer of multimedia software located right in downtown Manhattan. I think I have prepared quite well for the negotiation. It can be demonstrated in the following respects. First of all, before the negotiation, our teammates had met twice to discuss our strategies and tactics. Each of our teammates got considerably familiar with the given data, including a range of numbers like the sales increase rate and average salary, and so forth. Secondly, we summarized all the job expectations we would have for the new position. In other words, we noted down our requirements like salary expectation, welfare, bonus, vacation and so on. More importantly, we came up with rational reasons why we deserved what we asked for. Thirdly, we also worked out painstakingly what kinds of questions we might be asked then and how we shall respond. All of us worked hard to perfect the answers we drew out. The final step was practicing. One of our teammate acted as the employer and the rest as an employee to value our performance. Altogether, we had done a lot of homework before we went to the “battle”.
Thereinafter, I am going to detail the reasons for the success of some strategies and tactics as well as the failure of others. Though we finally could not reach an agreement with the employers, we did fulfill some achievements. The greatest success is our salary bargain. We finally reached a salary of $ 98, 000, ranking the second in all the group salaries. In the very beginning, we proposed a salary expectation of $ 120, 000 to the employers. We did know that it was impossible for us to get what we want so smoothly, and that there would be a great discount on it. So we hope to meet our bottom line eventually after our proposed salary was chopped by the employers. Just as expected, the employers offered us merely $ 90,000, but we tried to persuade them by telling them our MBA’s degree, our previous work experience and other relevant and critical abilities. We also raised the average product management salaries to them. At last, they still could not promise to give what we wanted and only accept a maximum of $98, 000. In order to “walk one step forward” in the following negotiations, we “stepped backward” in this round. Hence, we accepted it at last. The second success is our bonus and plane ticket refunds. It was a little bit easier to gain what we expected in this round because as mentioned above, we had compromised in the salary. We required the employers to compromise in this round. So finally they promised to give us a 10% bonus and $5,000 living expense subsidies as well as plane ticket refunds.
When you see the words “plane ticket refunds”, you may know we failed in the holiday negotiation. We asked to work officially from September 1st. before that, from May 22nd to the end of August, we planned to have a European trip. But the employers thought we were inexperienced and should undertake some training from July. So they only promised us a 5-week vacation. Also when we required the company to help us pay the fees of $ 9,000 to the moving company that would help us move the furniture and car to our residence, the company could only promise to pay up to $3, 000. Due to these problems as well as the gap between the $98, 000 salary promised and our bottom line of $ 114, 000, we did not reach the agreement finally.
From this negotiation exercise, I did learn a lot. In the first place, I got to know some relevant tactics to negotiate what you want in the future interviews. We should know specifically what we “must get” and what we “can” get. For the “must-get”, we should not back even a little, and for the “can-get”, we can comprise in due course so as to “go one step forward” for what we want later. It is out of the question for us to achieve all we want. So we should know to “give up” in what we do not need so urgently and stay firm on what we really need. Of course, a good knowledge of the company you are going to work is of great significance to your success of interview and negotiation. Therefore, full preparation shall never be overlooked! |
