Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better.
If you could earn thousands of dollars more a year just by having a two-minute conversation, would you do it? That might sound like an easy “Yes,” but for a lot of people, the answer, surprisingly, is no.
A startling number of people don’t negotiate their salary when they’re offered a job or haven’t had a raise in a long time. Over more than a decade of writing an advice column about work, I’ve been stunned by how frequently people tell me they’ve never fought for bigger numbers, not even once during their careers. Instead, they accept the first number an employer offers, because they’re worried that they’ll look greedy or mercenary. This strikes me as odd—the whole reason we work is for pay! And that conservative approach leaves people making far less than they could earn if they pushed past the discomfort and spoke up.
If you’re surprised to hear this, believe me, I am, too! (Personally, I like money far too much to forgo negotiating for more.) But here’s a representative smattering of what people have told me on this topic:
I’ve literally never negotiated, ever. For a long time, it simply wasn’t on my radar as a thing one did. I graduated in ’96, and I don’t recall it being standard career advice at that point. And I’ve just never thought about compensation through the lens of “what do I deserve?” or “what are my peers making?” I’ve always only thought in terms of “what do I need to get by?” and “how much do I want this job?” (The answers, respectively, were usually “not much” and “a whole lot.”) Also, it’s been quite firmly ingrained in me that as the owner of an English degree, I’m lucky to be gainfully employed at all.
I’ve never negotiated a salary. At every job I’ve ever had, I’ve gotten the sense that it wasn’t negotiable and that asking for more would be rude and jeopardize my candidacy, so I never have. It always amazes me that other people have the confidence. I’ve just always thought that the employer had all the power and I had none and not much I could offer.
I didn’t negotiate, and now that I’m in my job and realizing how busy, stressful, and demanding my position is, I wish I’d asked for more money. But I’ve never actually tried negotiating salary. While maybe there have been openings to do it, I’ve always been too afraid of losing out on the offer entirely.
Notably, too, that hesitation compounds over time. A few thousand dollars left on the table at the start of a job can translate into tens of thousands—or even more—in lost earnings across a career, as raises are often a percentage of your existing salary. And, while this practice is changing, even salaries at new jobs are sometimes pegged to what you were earning at your last job.
As for the fear that an employer might be so outraged by a candidate’s audacity at asking for more money that they might pull the offer entirely—it’s incredibly unlikely. Negotiation is such an incredibly routine part of hiring that—as long as you don’t ask for a number that’s wildly out of touch with the market in your field—no decent employer is going to respond by yanking your offer. In very rare cases a terrible one might—and if that happens, you can consider it a bullet dodged, because an employer that rescinds an offer because you dared to ask if the salary was negotiable is an employer that will also have a deeply dysfunctional culture once you’re working there (and good luck when you need to ask for time off or a more sustainable workload). That doesn’t mean you’ll always get the higher number—but no reasonable employer will be offended that you asked.
Some people seem to have a sense that they shouldn’t need to ask for more money because their employer should already be paying them what their work is worth:
I have never asked for a raise (or promotion) in my life, and I’m not about to start now. I would find it a very unpleasant and uncomfortable conversation and I don’t want to have it. I would just leave. If you aren’t willing to pay me what I’m worth, I know half a dozen other companies that would be happy to.
That might sound reasonable in principle, but in practice it means you’re likely to end up leaving jobs you otherwise enjoy when a two-minute conversation could get you more money and mean you don’t need to go anywhere.
And negotiation very often is just a two-minute conversation. People who have never negotiated salary tend to picture it as something much more involved and fraught—perhaps involving PowerPoint slides of your contributions and a lengthy, persuasive argument full of facts and figures to justify why you should be paid more. In reality, though, most successful negotiations are much shorter—often nothing more than, “Would you be able to go up to $X?” or “It’s been two years since my salary was set and I’m contributing at a higher level now. Could we revisit my pay?”
Sometimes people feel so uncomfortable talking about money that they plan to ask, and they even think they’ve asked, when in fact they haven’t:
I had a co-worker with whom I was really tight (still am). We were completely open with each other. She wanted a raise. I cheered her on, boosted her, worked with her on how to make her case, gave her some tips on language to use (the president was my direct boss so I spent more time with him). After the meeting I asked how it went and as she was telling me (she was not quite sure how it went), I said, “Did you actually ask for a raise?”
No. She never actually asked for more money. She asked about her future and her performance and she talked about her contributions, but she never posed the question. I wasn’t shocked—I think a lot of people, women especially, are afraid to outright ask for what they want—but it was a huge lesson in remembering that supporting material is important, but you gotta make the actual argument at some point.
People who overcome their discomfort and clearly ask for money often get it. And once you’ve done it, you realize you should have been doing it all along:
The job posting listed a salary range, and when someone from HR offered me the job in the middle of that range, I said, “Is there any room for negotiation?” assuming I would then have to really justify my request. She said, “I’ll check” and after a few days (seemed like forever, I was so anxious), came back and offered me more! I’m so glad I negotiated, I never expected it to be that easy, and I was terrified.
I’ve almost never negotiated—it always feels icky and uncomfortable to me, and I’m always 100 percent confident they’ll just go with someone else if I ask. For the last several years, I’ve had hourly work as a contractor and it was getting in the way of my own business. I resigned and the CFO was like, “No, you can’t resign, how can we make this worth your while?” I ended up negotiating work from home and double my hourly rate. Not gonna lie … I found the process so awful and painful I cried (and that was all on me, the CFO was great!) but in the end it was worth it.
I got interviews for two different director-level roles, and an offer for one of them came in while I was still mid-process with the other. I thought I was paid pretty well, but this was a 20 percent increase in salary. I have never negotiated an offer before and was super nervous, but I asked for more money, and they gave me the top of the range—a 30 percent increase over what I’m making now. I also asked them to delay my start date to give me time off between jobs and OMG THEY DID.
There are few moments in life where a two-minute conversation can yield thousands of extra dollars a year, which might then compound over an entire career. People who won’t push past their nerves and simply ask, “Could you go up to $X?” or “Do you have any room to increase that?” are paying a large price for that comfort.
