What is your salary expectation?
In that moment she filled with dread
as her future flashed before her eyes....
Would she ask for too little and get a lowball job offer?
Ask for too much and lose the opportunity?
Would they laugh her out of the office
out of the audaciousness of the ask?
I never want you to have these fears
or these outcomes when you're in a job interview,
or when you get a job offer and are
negotiating your salary. So in today's video,
I'm breaking down exactly how you
can do salary research for free so you can be
confident that you're asking for the right number.
If that sounds good, tap that like button
and let's jump straight into it!
We gotta start with something I know
everyone is wondering:
why don't they just tell us?
If you buy the line that a lot of HR folks give,
it's because they don't want their competitors
to know what they pay, which
n my humble opinion is BS.
First, if the company pays competitive pay,
as they proclaim to and their competitor just as well,
they're already going to be in the same pay range,
assuming they know what that is.
And in my experience, even without operating
with pay transparency have always known
exactly what my competitors were paying.
It also doesn't explain why companies ask you
what your salary expectations are.
Instead of telling you the budget for the role
to make sure it meets your salary expectations.
There is change coming Colorado led the country
with pay transparency laws. New York City has
an incoming pay transparency law this spring,
and of course businesses are mad about it.
In fairness, there are a lot of factors that
can influence your specific salary:
where you live, your education, your specific experience,
the industry and the size of the company.
Other compensation like equity,
and much, much more.
Of course, you need to do an appraisal of the role
that you're taking too. That said, you can
still nail down the range that you're looking for,
and make sure that you're appraising yourself
correctly in the job market - even a rapidly shifting
market like the one we're in right now.
This is where my Goldilocks strategy comes into play.
Like Goldilocks, we're going to consider three numbers
to find the one that's just right. First,
the walkaway number.
This is the lowest you would consider if it was
an otherwise perfect opportunity. Second,
your dream salary.
This number is too big to make your target
because if you got it you would literally feel like
they were throwing money at you.
And finally your target salary. T
his is the one that is just right.
Towards the end of the video, I'm going to tell you
exactly how to use these three numbers.
But before we use them,
we need to figure out what they are.
So let's start our salary research already.
Let's start with the easiest tools online salary sites,
there are a lot of them PayScale, Comparably,
Glassdoor, LinkedIn salary, there are so many to choose from.
But here's where most people go wrong,
they only go to one if the data is off, your numbers will be off.
This is why I suggest you go to at least three
of the big ones to find the average salary
and the salary range. This makes more sense
if you see it in action. So let's go see it in action
based on request that I got from a post that I
put up in my community tab the other day,
we are going to be researching what the salary
should look like for a data scientist.
So let's go to a few sites and see what they say.
Okay, so here I am in PayScale and just an FYI,
it did make me sign up for a free account,
it didn't used to do that it's a new thing.
It also made me verify that I'm not a robot more than one time.
So you guys know now I'm not a robot.
Anyway, I'm going to go into the salary report,
I'm an individual, I'm going to put that I am just
exploring because that is indeed what I am doing.
And I am an individual, I will put in the target job title.
Hopefully without making too many errors.
As I'm typing this, I'm going to put in some
random information, including just I'll use my market.
So New York, New York.
Now the thing that I do really like about PayScale is
it gives you a lot of different options to
give additional data that is going to help PayScale
gave you the most relevant information based on
the job title in which you're seeking,
you can fill in this information,
you can not fill out this information that is up to you.
So I'll just click a couple of things here.
And let us see what our salary range would be
based on what we're telling it we have our range.
And we can see that this one is a pretty big range.
So the range itself is 64k to 137k.
I'm writing that down with a median of 98k per year,
we can see the variable pay is included here as well.
market will your worth, so your market worth 102k.
So there's a lot of different data points that I can look at here.
But this isn't the only place that we're going to look at.
So the next place that I'm looking is over on Glassdoor.
Glassdoor you can see has less input than PayScale.
I do have a couple of options that I can use to make
this more specific, but I can see here that the
average pay is 117k. So this almost $20,000 difference
between PayScale and this. Probably somewhat accounted
for some of the information that I gave PayScale.
But I do see that the range is, again,
somewhat in the ballpark but a little bit higher
over here on Glassdoor, because it's 82k, up to 167k.
Now another thing that could be the difference
is that PayScale was giving me the median,
whereas this appears to be giving me the average,
which is the mean. So it's not quite the same.
And again, I think this is one of the reasons why
it's good for us to look more than one place.
So let's head over now to LinkedIn salary.
And here I can search for a data scientist.
And here I'm going to put in some of the same
criteria that I put in over in a scale and
there's no results found.
Alright, when I took out New York, here I have it.
So here I see that the base pay average is 106k
with a range of 72,700 to 150.k So
LinkedIn salary seems to be coming in at about
the midpoint between PayScale and Glassdoor,
but LinkedIn salary is for us wide data,
which removes the market specificity which
can actually have a really big impact depending
on where you live. So we're gonna flag that now.
In addition to the salary websites,
you may also have annual industry salary reports.
These are generally collected by an affiliation
from their members and are available for free.
If you're not aware of any, what you can do is
you can head over to Google but in your job title,
and then put salary report and then I would simply
ook through the results and see what came up.
And there seems to be a couple of potential options.
For the purpose of this video,
I won't spend too much time exploring each individually.
However, I would encourage you to follow those links.
And if there is one from a professional affiliation
that you trust, download it.
That said, there are a couple of things that I think
that you should know about the annual industry salary reports,
these generally do tend to be accurate,
but there are a few limitations.
Typically, the data is national, which can skew it.
And also because of the nature of them,
they tend to lag behind any market changes,
which we're seeing a lot of right now.
That said, I still think they're great to inform
your Goldilocks salary strategy. Now,
what's the common limitation between those s
alary surveys and the salary sites?
They are outdated.
As I mentioned, the market is moving fast.
Where can you look to get updated numbers?
Well, there are two places.
First, you can search open job postings.
While most companies still do not operate
with salary transparency, there are some that do.
For example, if you work in tech, y
ou can look to AngelList for jobs that disclose both
salary ranges and the equity range.
Or when using your typical job search site,
pay attention to opportunities that do list their ranges.
When you're looking at these you're looking at
two things is it looks to be in the ranges
you established in the prior stuff,
or are they tending to be above or below the averages.
Above indicates that the market has moved up.
So you should focus on those upper numbers.
This brings us to the other step,
which is taboo you've been taught It's impolite to ask,
but we're gonna ask anyways...
Talk to your colleagues about their salaries.
Unless you live in a place where you are legally prohibited
from doing so ask industry peers what they
make and do so unapologetically.
Do you think it's an accident that we've been taught
that it's not nice to talk about money,
and that there is so much shame around money,
in particular your expectation to
get money in exchange for your work?
Will people be weird about it?
Maybe.
But I honestly believe that the transparency
of individuals and organizations is how people
will be paid fairly and how we can
close the pay gaps that are out there.
But even more impactful is the next step.
In fact, I can't believe people don't do this more often.
Ask a Recruiter.
Recruiters have their finger on the pulse of
exactly what is happening in the market.
You know what budget they're working with,
the candidates are asking for,
and how much it's taking them to sign on the dotted line
of that new job offer. If you have a recruiter friend,
or are cultivating a connection with one ask.
Worst case scenario, they will tell you no
or they don't know.
Best case, to get really good info. O
h, we're not done yet.
Now we have a bunch of numbers,
it's time to set your Goldilocks salary strategy numbers,
look at the averages that you found.
And while average them out in the case of the
data scientists that I'm doing the salary research
for looking at the numbers,
I'm going to put it at about 110k.
Again, this isn't super scientific,
I haven't spent a lot of time
so if you are a data scientist in New York, I
'm not saying that this is accurate.
Please do your own research!
On top of this the upper ranges those become
your dream salary for my data scientist,
I'm going to set this out the 140k range
and finally the number that is still in the range flight
is the lowest number that you would objectively
consider for the perfect opportunity which brings
us how to put those numbers to use.
First of all, whenever you are asked about
your salary expectations, you should be asking,
"I need a bit more information about this job.
What is the budget for the role?"
If they won't answer - making it super awkward -
then give a range that is your target up to your dream salary.
This sets the anchor high and makes the
floor the salary that you really want.
But what is your walkaway number come into play?
You never say it.
It comes in when you get a job offer
or a job opportunity that is below your target
and it's a job you really want.
This number removes your emotion from your minimum salary.
Hopefully you'll never need to use it.
But if you're in that boat where you're
negotiating your salary, you need these numbers.
But more importantly,
you need to know how to do it with confidence
to stage yourself for success.
So I want you to go and watch this video right now
where I give you my best salary negotiation tips.
But before you go if this video helped you
figure out your target salary give it a like.
Really helps my channel, makes you my favorite career bestie
Win win situation going on.
As always my friend thank you so much for watching.
I will see you in the next video.
Bye for now!