Learn how to negotiate like a diplomat, think on your feet like an improv performer, and master job offer negotiation like a professional athlete when you download a copy of our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.


salary negotiations

What are Salary Negotiations?

What’s the best way to claim more money in salary negotiations? Truly great negotiators recognize that haggling strategies alone may leave significant money on the table.

Most negotiators don’t engage in the kinds of high-stakes bargaining we read about in publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, but almost everyone will find themselves engaged in salary negotiations during the course of their career.

Especially for a new employee, salary negotiations can be intimidating, and it’s one of the most important difficult conversations to have at the beginning of your career. But even for experienced employees, salary negotiations are never predictable.

Savvy job seekers remember to treat these negotiations as the beginning of a long-term relationship. You can get that relationship off on the right foot by looking for opportunities to give the employer what it wants even as you seek to get what you want.

Unfortunately, the first number mentioned in salary negotiations, such as how much one earned in one’s most recent job, exerts a strong influence on the discussions that follow. Yet, when we start looking at “salary negotiations” as “job negotiations,” we realize this doesn’t have to be the case.

The more information you can provide about what you value (without revealing your bottom line), the better equipped you and the other party will be to identify new issues to discuss. And the more questions you ask, the more you will learn about what the other party values. This type of information exchange will put you in a good position to claim as much money and other value as possible for yourself.

To learn more about finding success in salary negotiations, download a complimentary copy of our special report, Salary Negotiations: How to Negotiate Salary: Learn the Best Techniques to Help You Manage the Most Difficult Salary Negotiations and What You Need to Know When Asking for a Raise, right now!

The following items are tagged salary negotiations:

Salary Negotiation: How to Negotiate Salary: Learn the Best Techniques to Help You Manage the Most Difficult Salary Negotiations and What You Need to Know When Asking for a Raise

Posted by & filed under Free Report.

Salary negotiations are often stressful and challenging. But with the right strategies, you can negotiate your employment terms with ease. In Salary Negotiation: How to Negotiate Salary: Learn the Best Techniques to Help You Manage the Most Difficult Salary Negotiations and What You Need to Know When Asking for a Raise, you’ll discover innovative ways … Read More

Salary Negotiation: How to Ask for a Higher Salary

Posted by & filed under Salary Negotiations.

For a new employee, salary negotiation skills can be the most important and the most intimidating, but the most important, of difficult conversations to have at the beginning of your career. A new employee, successfully negotiating a salary offer up by $5,000 could make a huge difference over the course of her career. … Read More

Negotiating Salary: Confronting the Gender Pay Gap

Posted by & filed under Salary Negotiations.

In December 2014, leaks of data hacked from Sony Pictures revealed that when negotiating salary for their roles in the film American Hustle, actresses Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams came away with significantly less than their male costars in the ensemble cast. Lawrence and Adams were paid 7% of the film’s profits; Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, … Read More

How to Negotiate Salary: 3 Winning Strategies

Posted by & filed under Salary Negotiations.

The question of how to negotiate salary seems to preoccupy negotiators more than any other—and with good reason, considering how dramatically even a small salary increase can impact our lifetime earnings. The following three salary bargaining tips from leading negotiation experts will help you gain more from your new-job negotiations. … Read How to Negotiate Salary: 3 Winning Strategies

Are Salary Negotiation Skills Different for Men and Women?

Posted by & filed under Salary Negotiations.

Most negotiators don’t engage in the kinds of high-stakes bargaining we read about in publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, but almost every negotiator will need advanced salary negotiation skills during the course of her career to deal with a scenario that is, in many ways, the definition of a … Read More

Negotiating a Salary When Compensation Is Public

Posted by & filed under Salary Negotiations.

Faced with the prospect of negotiating a salary with a new employer, job candidates often feel anxious, confused, and tentative. Historically, organizations have tended to keep information about salaries for open positions opaque, assuming they benefit when prospective employees are in the dark about how much they might earn. But new laws and broader marketplace … Read Negotiating a Salary When Compensation Is Public

Salary Negotiation: How to Ask for a Higher Salary

Posted by & filed under Salary Negotiations.

For a new employee, salary negotiation skills can be the most important and the most intimidating, but the most important, of difficult conversations to have at the beginning of your career. A new employee, successfully negotiating a salary offer up by $5,000 could make a huge difference over the course of her career. … Read More

Salary Negotiations in the NBA and Beyond

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

In negotiation, one great deal can beget another. For the National Basketball Association (NBA), its stellar 2016 national television contract begat dozens of stellar salary negotiations for top players and even mediocre ones. But after the boom year passed, players’ expectations bounced up against reality. The story, which could repeat itself after the next TV … Read Salary Negotiations in the NBA and Beyond

Negotiating a Non-Compete Agreement with Employers

Posted by & filed under Conflict Resolution.

In integrative negotiation, each side seeks to create and claim value with an eye towards the future of the negotiating relationship. One way of securing this relationship is a noncompete agreement: Employers sometimes ask potential employees to agree not to work for their competitors in the future but don’t assume such requests are nonnegotiable. … Read More

Win-Win Negotiation: Managing Your Counterpart’s Satisfaction

Posted by & filed under Win-Win Negotiations.

As the following points of win-win negotiation will demonstrate, ensuring that your counterpart is satisfied with a particular deal requires you to manage several aspects of the negotiation process, including his outcome expectations, his perceptions of your outcome, the comparisons he makes with others, and his overall negotiation experience itself. … Read More

Salary Negotiations in the Era of Fair-Pay Laws

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

In recent years, some U.S. states have passed fair-pay laws that affect salary negotiations in the workplace. California, for example, passed a law in 2015 that requires all employers operating in the state to prove they pay employees of different genders equally for “substantially similar” work, according to the Wall Street Journal.  … Read Salary Negotiations in the Era of Fair-Pay Laws

Renegotiation: When a Sweetheart Deal Isn’t So Sweet

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

It was perhaps “the sweetest of sweetheart deals” negotiated by a Major League Baseball (MLB) team, according to the New York Times. So why did the Kansas City Royals throw out their old agreement with star catcher Salvador Perez, midcontract, in favor of a renegotiation that was far more favorable to the Golden Glove winner? … Read More

Should Women “Lean In” to Create More Value in Negotiations?

Posted by & filed under Dealmaking.

Back in early 2008, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg began thinking about hiring Sheryl Sandberg, a vice president at Google and a former chief of staff for the U.S. Department of the Treasury, as the social-media company’s new chief operating officer. The two met several nights a week for almost two months to discuss … Read More

Expert Job Negotiation Advice for Long-Term Success

Posted by & filed under Salary Negotiations.

When you enter a job negotiation, what goals are foremost on your mind? If you’re like most people, you are primarily preoccupied with making a great impression and winning the job. Acing the interviews can seem like the only thing that matters, especially if you’ve been out of work or desperate to escape a miserable … Read More

Should Salary Expectations Be a Laughing Matter?

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

In salary negotiations, job candidates are often at a disadvantage relative to the hiring organization. Due to the well-documented anchoring effect, the first figure introduced into the discussion tends to strongly influence the salary expectations. Unfortunately for candidates, the first figure mentioned in a negotiation often is not in their favor. … Read Should Salary Expectations Be a Laughing Matter?

Discussing Salary At Work

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Have you ever been tempted into discussing salary at work? Have you revealed how much you earn to a coworker? Your answer to these questions may depend on your age. Comparing salaries has long been a social taboo in the United States, but members of the Millennial generation—people born in the 1980s and 1990s— are changing … Read Discussing Salary At Work

Why Great Negotiators Earn More Money

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What’s the best way to claim more money in a negotiation? Many professional negotiators would recommend hard-bargaining tactics, such as asking the other party to disclose their bottom line, standing firm on price, and threatening to walk away. But truly great negotiators recognize that using haggling strategies alone may leave significant money on the table. … Read Why Great Negotiators Earn More Money

Dear Negotiation Coach: The Case for Lowering Your Salary Expectations

Posted by & filed under Dealing with Difficult People.

We received a question regarding salary expectations and the potential problems with lowering those expectations. Francesca Gino, Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and author of Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013) shared an answer that’s applicable not … Read More

Asking for More in Salary Negotiation: When Jennifer Lawrence and Jennifer Aniston Spoke Out

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“We’re very much a sexist society,” actress Jennifer Aniston said in back in 2015 in an interview with the New York Times, addressing not just the constant questions she faces about marriage and children, but about recent revelations of pay discrimination and salary negotiation in Hollywood. “Women are still not paid as much as men,” Aniston … Read More

Win-Win Negotiation with Bethenny Frankel

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

In this negotiation scenario straight from reality television, Lu Ann de Lesseps, Ramona Singer, and Sonja Morgan test their negotiating prowess against reality tv network Bravo in their contract renewal renegotiations. Skinnygirl mogul and financial whiz kid, Bethenny Frankel, offers a template for bargaining for success on reality tv and beyond. … Read Win-Win Negotiation with Bethenny Frankel

Women and Negotiation: Why Women Sometimes Ask for Less

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

The average college­-educated woman earns $713,000 less over the course of her working life than her male counterpart, according to the Coalition of Labor Union Women. What explains this persistent gender gap? Women employees’ awareness that they could be penalized for negotiating assertively on their own behalf is one factor, according to new research from … Read More