As promised, over the next few weeks I’m going to take each one of these idiocies that I wrote about last and explain why they are absolutely foolish…
When you are asked how much money you are making, counter that question with a question by asking “well, how much does this position pay?”… This is crazy… any employer with any brains at all is going to look at you like you’re crazy if you answer their question this way… the idea of answering a question with a question is poor judgement.. no employer in their right mind is going to respond to this positively… if you say something stupid like this and you are fortunate enough to not be thrown out of the interview, the interviewing or hiring authority is going to say “I asked you what you are presently making”… in other words, he or she wants to know what you’re making..TELL THEM… it’s really that simple… trying to be coy or cute will lead to disaster… so when asked this simple question give a simple answer… tell them what you are presently making and/or what you made in your last job… end of discussion!
When asked about how much money you are making, give a range of the money you’ve made over the last few years…The same fool who wrote the first bit of advice, probably came up with this dumb answer too… again, if you’re fortunate enough to still be in the interview without being thrown out, the interviewing or hiring authority is going to say, “aaah, I didn’t ask you the range of what you’ve been earning, I asked you to tell me exactly what you’ve been earning”
Any kind of answer to the above two questions that is not an exact, specific number is going to communicate that you don’t want to tell the interviewing her hiring authority what you are. making…that you are trying to hide your previous either poor or low pay.. I assure you that any gamesmanship like this will NOT get you hired…
Have three numbers in mind regarding the salary you will be willing to accept… a high salary, a median salary and the lowest salary you would consider…. What’s the reason for this idea? It has absolutely nothing to do with the kind of offer that you may or may not get… as if your coming up with these figures means anything to the interviewing or hiring authority… I can’t even figure out the reason anybody would give this advice… here’s the deal, the better you sell yourself the better the offer you are going to get..Don’t even consider anything like this until you actually get an offer, then you’ve got something to think about… this advice is a waste of time
Employers want to pay as little as they can get away with… that’s just not true… I’ve spoken to more than 23,000 hiring authorities in my career… finding out what they want to hire the candidate… sending them candidates… negotiating… and getting people hired… every once in a while I do run into a hiring authority that seems to be more concerned about paying as little as they can… they are more interested in the money then they are the people… but there are really very few of these kinds of folks… most people who do the hiring realize that they are going to get about what they pay for… they know that money is relative to the quality of candidate they may get… I don’t think that I’ve ever heard an employer tell me, “we’re cheap, we want to pay as little as we can to get as much as we can”…If you enter a job offer negotiation or even an interview with this adversarial attitude, you’re not gonna go very far
