Exactly what to say when recruiters ask you to name the first number… and other negotiation word-for-words

There are a lot of resources out there that talk about salary negotiation but many tend to skew a bit theoretical. In my experience, one of the hardest things about negotiating your salary is knowing what to say in tough, ambiguous situations with a power balance that’s not in your favor. What’s OK? What’s rude? What are the social norms? And so on. Before I started interviewing.io, I’ve worked as a software engineer, an in-house recruiter, and an agency recruiter, so I’ve literally been on all sides of the negotiating table. For the last few years, I’ve been guest-lecturing MIT’s 6.UAT, a class about technical communication for computer science majors. Every semester, negotiation is one …

How to sabotage your salary negotiations efforts before you even start

At interviewing.io, we’ve coached hundreds of people through salary negotiation. We’re good at it — our average user gets $50k more in cash, and we have a 94% success rate.

Having done this a lot, we’ve seen our users make the same two mistakes, over and over, BEFORE they start working with us. These mistakes are costly and make it harder for us to do our jobs. Both involve how you talk to recruiters at the start of your job search, way before there’s an offer. Even if you never use our service, you should absolutely avoid these mistakes.