Dealing With Low-Ball Job Offers

Job SearchMoneyNegotiation

Jan 30

Written By Emilie Aries

Episode 439 | Author: Emilie Aries

The truth of the job search and your negotiating power.

What should you do when a job offer comes with a lower-than-expected offer?

This topic was inspired by a listener who wrote in about a situation many of you have likely experienced as well. When you’re looking for work, seeing a job offer in your inbox is a thrill. If you open the email to find a proposed salary that doesn’t even hit the bottom of your range, that thrill dies pretty quickly.

In this episode, I share three tips that I hope will help you temper your expectations and give you the confidence to push for what you’re worth. Let’s break them down.

#1: Job searches take longer these days

When a rejection letter or lack of response looms, consider the reality of today’s job market. Back in 2018, a Randstad survey found that job seekers spent an average of 5 months looking for work before accepting a suitable position.

When the pandemic rolled in, it changed the corporate landscape in a lot of ways. Given what I’ve seen working with job seekers across many industries and seniority levels, it can often take a year to find the best next opportunity. This matches up with new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that suggests many people submit up to 100 applications before securing a job.

Keeping all that in mind, getting no bites in the first month starts to feel a bit less like a personal failing and more like par for the course.

#2: You need to consider supply and demand

Hiring is all about supply and demand, which means statistics like the national average salary for your position aren’t that illustrative. Beware the tendency to have unrealistic expectations of your market worth. Remember: this isn’t just about you, your education and experience, and whatever salary you’ve earned in the past. Their offer is a reflection of the labor market today. What matters most to hiring teams is the number of people in your region who share your skillset and are also looking for work. That’s going to heavily influence your negotiation power.

This isn’t to say you should lower your expectations, per se, but remember that the likelihood of the hiring team being willing to negotiate your salary offer is directly dependent on a metric you can’t see: the number of other people they can offer the job to instead.

#3: Negotiate without apology at the peak of your power

Although the first two tips are a bit doom and gloom, there’s plenty of room for improvement in our hiring systems. Arming yourself with the plain facts also serves to highlight where you have the most power in this process.

Make the goal of your job search acquiring a number of official job offers, rather than “landing a job.” Once that written offer letter is in your hands, you are perfectly positioned to negotiate for what you want, even if they lowballed you on the starting salary. For step-by-step details on how to deliver your counter-offer with confidence, download the free Bossed Up Negotiation Guide!

Because talent acquisition teams tend to judge their own performance based on a specific metric—how long it takes to fill the position—by the time you receive an offer, they have spent a lot of time on this pursuit. If you turn down the offer, it’s wasted hours that bring down their stats, so they are highly motivated to get the deal done.

This doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to get what you want—they could still have more potentials next in line for the same offer, which means you should be willing to walk away if it doesn’t pan out—but you’re now in the perfect position to stand confidently in your ability to negotiate for the salary you deserve.

The future of salary transparency

To be clear, there’s no denying it’s an unfair playing field. The talent acquisition team interviewing you knows exactly how many candidates they have to fall back on if you don’t pan out. You, on the other hand, have to go in blind, armed only with what you believe you deserve to be paid.

A systemic solution is in the works, though it has a ways to go yet. Several states and cities have passed pay transparency laws, with Colorado leading the way! However, fixing this shady negotiation blindspot across the board will take federal legislation that forces all employers to be upfront about the salary range available for each job posting.

Whether you’re currently hunting for a new job or not, salary transparency and equal pay affect every one of us. To learn more about how you can join the fight, check out the Bossed Up Take Action page and explore our policy priorities.

How have you dealt with low-ball offers in your own job search? The Bossed Up job search resource hub is a great place to expand your knowledge and boost your negotiation confidence with actionable tips and guidance from our experienced team. You can also head over to our Courage Community on Facebook or join us in our group on LinkedIn to share your own experiences.

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EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 439. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the founder and CEO of Bossed Up.
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And today's episode was inspired by a recent listener email who wrote in about a really frustrating but very relatable situation that they're facing having to do with getting consistent, lowball offers. And I'm not going to name this person. She didn't want me to quote her directly in terms of what she said in her email. But I'll paraphrase to give you a sense of the problem, because I think it's a very common one. This person is frustrated because she's been job searching for about three months, and in that time, she has secured three job offers, which I think is actually a huge feat. And I'll tell you more about why I think that in a moment. But all three offers have been presented to her at about $15,000 below what she considers and is researched to be the national average for the kind of position that she expects, or the salary that she feels that she should be receiving based on her experience and skills in the marketplace.
So they're coming in low, and she's getting told no when she's trying to negotiate. She's being told that these aren't really negotiable offers. And so, obviously, that is a frustrating situation to find yourself in, where the going rate of your skills and experiences in the marketplace feel like they're not getting you what you feel entitled to or what you feel you deserve. How do you handle that, especially if you're getting stonewalled when it comes to negotiation?
Today, I want to break this down with giving you three key things to think about. For any job seeker or anyone who's even thinking about job searching in the year ahead, these are the three core principles I want you to keep in mind when it comes to navigating a shifting marketplace for talent and dealing with these low ball offers that make you feel frustrated, disrespected, and, frankly, lost. So here are three things I want you to keep in mind.
First, the modern job search takes longer than it used to. Back in 2018, Randstad found that it took, on average, five months to secure your next job, and that was pre-pandemic. So with the economic volatility and tight labor marketplace that so many industries have faced over the last few years, I would be very sure that the national average on that front has only increased since 2020. Now, are there differences, um, across different industries, definitely. But from my vantage point as, uh, someone who's worked strategically, with job seekers across industries and across different levels of seniority in recent years. The most strategic job searches that I've supported my clients with in recent years take about a year, especially if you are holding out for a great opportunity. In fact, there's new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that finds it is not uncommon for people to submit upwards of 100 applications before securing their next job. Is that deeply depressing and completely exasperating? Absolutely. But I hope it's helpful to just level set here and recognize this is not a you thing and that this takes way longer than it used to. Three months is far below average when it comes to the turnaround time that folks are making it happen in terms of securing a new opportunity.
Now, I'm no financial advisor, but from my vantage point, that old advice about having squirreled away a three to six month emergency fund is outdated now, like in an ideal world and I know this is super privileged and not accessible to most people, or to many people, I should say. But in an ideal world, today's working professionals should expect six to twelve months to be the time period that it can take to secure a new job and should have an emergency fund that is able to cover and float you for that kind of duration in order to make your next best financial move in the interim. And for those of us who are like six to twelve months, like fat chance, Emilie I do not have that kind of cash on hand. I would strongly suggest considering a bridge job to bring in some or any kind of income that helps tide you over financially so that you are able to hold out for the best possible offer and best career move that you can make instead of having to settle for a low ball offer from a place of financial desperation.
And there is just no shame in that game. I've got clients who are higher education professionals who have been moonlighting with a bartending job because it brings in a little income. It reduces the economic anxiety involved in keeping yourself afloat. And frankly, it's fun to work with your hands after years of simply working with your head. So just don't be so limiting to yourself. To think you can only secure one kind of job and it has to be a great career move, like freelancing, picking up odd jobs in the interim is a common experience for job seekers today, and there's no shame that should be attached to that. Is that bartending job going to go on her resume? No, it's not. But that's not the point of a bridge job. It's just to tide you over.
The second thing to keep in mind here is that supply and demand principles absolutely apply in the talent marketplace. Supply and demand economics are paramount. They underscore every interaction that you're having when it comes to being a job seeker. These employers are trying to get their positions filled as quickly and cost efficiently as possible. And on the other side of the equation, you're looking to maximize your earnings. Both of you are playing a waiting game, but it's different, right? On the one side, it's how long do I have to wait? Aka, how much money do I have to spend before I'm able to effectively fill this role? And on your end of the spectrum, it's how long do I have to wait until I can happily accept a great offer? These are the top of mind questions for both parties involved, and so many talent professionals are evaluated based on their time to fill or time to hire metrics, the time in which it takes to go from an open position to a closed deal with a job seeker, a candidate joining the team. And that's designed to really evaluate TA teams or talent acquisition teams efficiency with filling positions. Now, that's just one metric, but it's a very common metric used to gauge their success. And you'll note that they're rarely evaluated on the quality of those hires, which they can chalk up to all kinds of other factors. If you're not retaining talent, that doesn't necessarily mean it's anything to do with talent acquisition's performance there. So they would argue that it's not their job to retain talent, it's simply their job to acquire talent. So TA folks or recruiters are not evaluated often on the quality or longevity of those hires, but rather, they focus on the speed with which they're getting candidates like you over the finish line and accepting their offer. So the more options that they have in their pipeline, in other words, candidates that they can turn to with offers, the better things go for them. And the more options you have in your pipeline, in other words, job offers in hand, the more you can turn down lowball options and negotiate harder for better starting salaries.
Now, in recent years, a lot of industries have been navigating full on talent wars, paying higher and higher salaries to acquire talent, and dealing with positions that are difficult or damn near impossible to fill. Now, in 2023, there are many calls for a market correction of some kind. In fact, I heard one leader say that salary expectations got completely out of control in 2020 and pointed to the softening labor market as a good and necessary thing for the health of our economy overall. This can also, of course, manifest in the form of lower offers or even lowball offers, as you are writing in about, becoming more common. At the end of the day, when other people in your profession become more willing to take lower offers instead of holding out for higher paying ones, all workers' negotiating power diminishes. This is why collective bargaining and workers united in the quest for equal pay or fair wages can be such a powerful approach to increasing wages for all of us and as they say, a rising tide lifts all boats.
That said, as an individual candidate, you still hold immense power, especially upon the receipt of a formal offer. Think of it this way, every single hour that a company invests in your interview process is a sunk cost that they don't want to squander. So once you get to the point of them making a formal offer, your power is huge. It doesn't get any bigger after you accept, right? That is the most powerful moment you have as a prospective employee. They don't want to lose you and waste all the time and money that they've spent thus far. And it's at this stage that you hold the power to walk away from a deal that's not up to your standards to hold out for something better. Now that power, of course, doesn't always feel like a lot of power because it comes with a cost to you, more time and more uncertainty about what the market could actually produce that would meet your expectations and how long you're going to have to wait for that. This is, again, where the privilege of having an emergency fund or a bridge job keeping you financially afloat can make a huge difference.
So my final piece to focus on here is to use that power to negotiate without apology. Once you have a formal written offer in hand, it's time to use the power you have without succumbing to apologizing or permission seeking patterns that have been ingrained in so many of us, especially as women. Don't ask if the offer is negotiable. Tell them what it's going to take to get this deal done. Now, I'm not saying you haven't done this, but this is a good refresher or reminder for all of us listening that sentence. Starters that can help you get going with a more assertive counteroffer might sound like this, thank you for the offer to move forward, I'm looking for a base salary of blank or I'd love to sign today and get this finalized. The salary I'd need to do so is blank. Or, as we discussed earlier in the process, my salary requirements are blank. This assertive approach doesn't mean you can't also be grateful, right? So be sure to always open with appreciation and try to close with an open ended question like, is that something you could look into for me, in order to show that you're open to exploring how you might be able to move this deal forward.
But this also means that you got to be ready to walk away if they can't meet your needs. It requires standing confidently in your ability to go out in the market and get that kind of an offer elsewhere if need be. Now, if the person you're dealing with says I'm not able to negotiate or gives you an indication that this is our best and final offer, which would be really odd, by the way, if their first offer is their final and best offer, like I call BS, that is not how this is supposed to work. That's not how it often works. But if that's the indication that they give you, don't let up. Ask them to do the work of finding out if they can be approved to give you more. This means asking them to do more work, which is not easy for any of us and not preferable for any of us, right? But this means that the choice is now on that talent acquisition professional. They might go through the trouble to run your request up their chain of command because remember, they want to close this deal that reflects well on them, right?
So they might go and run your request up their flagpole, or if they have a robust pipeline of candidates waiting in the wing who are all qualified, right? Because your skills in this marketplace are widely available. If that's the case, they're going to say, no, thanks, I'm going to go offer this to candidate number two, or number three, or number four. So this is what I mean when I talk about supply and demand. If there are many of you, and let's be clear, we are all replaceable, right? But if there are many candidates with your skills that meet the needs of this open position, if they have lots of options from their talent acquisition side of the bargaining table, they're not going to be that motivated to give you more. In fact, when you quote the national average for your position and the offers you're getting being 15k under that, that national average does not factor into this equation whatsoever. So let's not allow those kinds of macro level statistics to make you feel slighted by offers that are coming in lower than that or make you feel entitled to anything more. It all comes back to supply and demand in your industry, in your market, geographically. So if the folks you're negotiating with have other options, they're just not going to be very incentivized to increase this offer to you, and you're going to have to pound the pavement. You're going to have to put in more legwork. It's going to take you more time to source the higher quality offers that you're looking for. Now, I would argue it's worth it, because let me tell you, I hear from folks all the time who have resentfully accepted lower offers than they wanted because they felt like they had no other option. The mystery door of continuing their job search felt too anxiety inducing or they were financially out of options, and then they felt resentful from day one. If you feel resentful about your employment situation on day one, that is not going to end well. That's not good for your health.
And I'm not saying it's an easy thing because a lot of people have to take jobs they don't want to take. I've had to take my fair share of jobs that I didn't want to have to take. Right? That happens. None of us are above that experience. You got to do what you got to do to make ends meet in this world. But it means your job search continues, right? It means you don't unpack your belongings in this new office, right. You are continuing your job search as you move forward. Now, to be clear, this whole thing, this whole system is tremendously unfair. None of these are good options. None of this advice is a silver bullet, and I wish I had easier answers for you, right. But as an individual worker, you just don't know what options or what information the people you're negotiating with have to work with.
So as an individual worker, your bargaining power is just limited by a lack of information. There is a systemic solution to this which would take the onus off the individual entirely, and that is pay transparency. Pay transparency laws have been passed in many states and many cities now, thankfully, uh, spearheaded by Colorado in particular. So I'm very proud of Colorado's work on this front. But federal legislation to require employers to be transparent and upfront about salary bans associated with any role that they're hiring for has languished in Congress, along with all kinds of things that are not getting done in Congress right now. So, recognize that until we have broader protections for workers, your information is somewhat limited. So, yes, the bottom line here is, in a world of supply and demand economics, where supply and demand economics really influences your options in the job marketplace. Your job is to maximize your options by maximizing your power through landing as many possible offers as you can. So if you're motivated to learn more, you can learn all about the fight for salary transparency, along with all kinds of systemic solutions that would help lead to a more gender equitable world at bossedup.org/takeaction and for lots more details and scripts on how to navigate your negotiation how to counter offer a ah, new job offer, you can get my downloadable, super detailed and totally free negotiation guide at bossedup.org/negotiation I hope this was helpful. To the person who wrote in, and to you. If you're thinking about a job search or trying to negotiate a raise or maximize your employment opportunities in the year ahead, we have lots more job search resources on our website, and I'll drop a link to that resource hub in today's show notes, along with a link to Hired my on demand video course for
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navigating the modern job search and how to maximize your best possible opportunities, which you can learn all about at bossedup.org/gethired. In the meantime, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose, and together let's lift as we climb.
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