What is your salary expectation?
You're here today because you want to know. how to answer the salary question,
and hopefully feel super confident when you do.
And that is exactly what I'm going to teach you today.
Hello and welcome back to my channel,
where I help you slay your career and cultivate the successful life you deserve.
One of the questions that I get asked most frequently is,
what salary should I ask for? If you are exploring a new opportunity,
this is going to be a question that you need to
answer for yourself at some point.
I want to start off by tackling the biggest myth that is out there,
and that is that you should never be the first one to state your number.
The reason why this myth is persistent is that most people
don't actually know what they should be making,
so if they are the first to state their number,
they either price themselves out of the running,
when they actually would have gotten into super competitive
and really good compensation package. Or they don't ask for nearly enough,
and they end up being completely undervalued because
the company was willing to pay way more.
However, what I'm going to teach you today is to
know exactly what your number is, and how and when you should ask for it.
So that the salary negotiation actually becomes one of the easiest pieces of
finding a new job. If you're ready to learn what your number is,
go ahead and click that like button, and let's get right into it.
In order to answer this question, you need to know the obvious.
And that is what is your number, what salary are you going to ask for?
The most important thing that you need to know,
long before you're actually asked what your salary expectations are.
,is what your salary expectation actually is.
I speak with way too many ambitious professionals
who are kind of grasping at straws and feeling around in the dark
in order to figure out what this number is.
They're basing it on what they think their friends are making,
or what they're currently making right now,
or what they think the market is doing
based on some obscure information that they saw on Glassdoor
or something along those lines.
One of the markers that's actually going to differentiate
you as a candidate is going to know exactly what compensation
you actually should be earning. And yes,
this is going to take a little bit of work for you to do.
The thing is asking for competitive salary is going to be one
of the things that actually qualifies you for the role.
When you're asking for the right amount for the value and the skills
and the experience that you're bringing to the table,
the company is going to know that it's acting as a qualifier.
Now this question is asked for a whole bunch of obvious reasons
during the interview process, which includes making sure that candidates
that are being considered for an opportunity
are actually candidates that the company could hire.
And this works out very well for you ,
because it makes sure that as you actually progressed
through the process that you're not going to get to the very end
and find out that their $50,000 below what your actual expectation is.
Hopefully it's not that big of a delta,
but you know... It has happened.
One of the ways that you're actually going to stand out
as a candidate is being thoroughly knowledgeable
about the value that you bring to the table,
and knowing how that value is actually appraised in the marketplace.
There are a lot of places where you can go
in order to find what your salary should be. In fact,
if you want to try this out, head over to Google right now,
put your job title as well as your and salary expectation,
and it is going to come up with a whole bunch of
different results on what you're going to find
is that those results are actually all over the place.
And this is one of the things that people actually really struggle
with to determine what their number actually should be. And the thing is,
wading through this information is part of that process
to actually figure out what your range is,
but it's not actually the best way to do so.
What you'll find is if you're relying on those resources
that are freely available on the internet without the right processes in place,
you might end up asking for the wrong number.
You might be asking for something higher or lower,
and that's not what we want here. This video would be way too long
if I did a deep dive into how you can exactly find your
number that you should be asking for.
If this is the deep dive that you actually want,
and it's going to serve you at this point in your search,
I invite you to follow the link down below to actually register
for the totally free masterclass to help you find your number. Now,
if you already know your number, you're like, Jennifer, I've got this.
Then it's time for you to move into the actual process of asking for your
number. I want to go through the steps of the job search journey
where you actually are going to be asked about your salary expectation
and the very first one is filling in a job application.
I know a lot of career coaches will give you a ton of different tactics
to help you avoid this question. However,
what you need to know is if it's on the application form,
there's a very high probability that the recruiter is using it to filter
candidates. If you've ever worked as a recruiter,
you know that you can open up an opportunity and get hundreds, if not thousands,
of job applications and this becomes a very easy way to start filtering through
people. Why is that? Because people who aren't qualified for the position
don't actually know what the position pays,
and this is why as long as you know your number
and you're confident that you're asking for the right amount
based on your market, your experience and your role,
you absolutely should not have any trepidation in terms
of putting your target salary in at this point.
I actually love having transparency in terms of salary expectations
early in the process because what it does is it saves you a lot of time.
If your expectations are simply far out of the realm.
of what the company has the ability to pay. This saves them time.
It saves you time and if you really become excited about an opportunity,
and they just can't afford you,
it's going to save you a lot of hard decisions and possibly heartbreak. Now,
if not on the application,
the next place that you may potentially actually encounter
this question is during a phone interview or a phone screen,
especially if it's with a recruiter. No,
I'm not totally for always being the first person to actually give your target
salary. If the question actually comes up here, what I recommend is saying,
"Well, I have a target salary in mind.
I don't quite know enough about this role to appraise it.
Can I ask you his dad what the budget is for the role,
and I can let you know if that's a range that I'm generally considering at this
time. "
This actually is going to very quickly flip the script
to give them the opportunity to tell you what they're actually looking to pay,
and then you can make the determination
on if that's in the range that you're interested in or not.
Now what I recommend is actually rehearsing this to yourself a few times.
Most people don't actually reply like this. Most people when asked a question,
especially in an interview, feel like they have to be the ones to answer.
However,
if it's truly very early in the consideration process and the question is asked,
you might not actually have enough information.
to know how you appraise that role.
It's very fair at this point to actually ask them,
and the majority of recruiters that you do speak with
are going to give you the range that they have budgeted for the role. Now,
if the recruiter won't give you the range, this is actually a red flag for me,
because this tells me that the company is making a hiring decision
based on price versus fit for the actual opportunity.
Now you can do with that what you will.
The next place that this is actually going to come up is during an interview.
So you've passed the phone screen,
and now you're either in additional phone interviews,
or maybe you're even in an onsite interview.
And at some point this question has to come up,
because at some point it is going to become about money.
If it does come up in an interview,
you can revert to the script that I just gave you to use
with a recruiter and you can use it with the hiring manager.
Or whoever is actually asking you that question. Alternately,
if you do feel like you know enough about the role, you know your numbers,
and you have a general idea of how you would actually appraise this role,
you can give a ballpark at that point in time.
The final place that you might be asked is when they've actually made an offer.
Now, I'm actually not a fan of getting this far into the process
without having any discussions about numbers.
Because while you have determined the actual fit, and the value that you bring,
and hopefully if they've sold you on the opportunity as well,
if you've gotten to the point of the offer,
it doesn't actually mean that you're financially aligned
in terms of what you expect to be making versus what they can expect to pay.
I'd actually love to hear from you when in terms of your search,
do you actually like to have the conversation surrounding compensation?
Let me know in the comments down below. However, if that's where you are,
it's where you are and this is where you actually segue into salary
negotiations. So what they're going to do either verbally or written,
they're going to give you an offer. Now,
once you've gotten through telling them what your salary expectation is
and you've gotten the job offer,
your next step is going to be evaluating the offer.
And that is exactly what my next video is about.
If you haven't already hit that subscribe button,
plus a notification bell, so you know as soon as it comes out. And again,
if you would benefit from deep diving into the process
to find out exactly what your number is,
and how you can actually frame yourself for success in negotiating your salary,
you will absolutely want to check out my free masterclass.
The link is in the description down below,
I highly recommend that you go and check it out. And as always,
if you've gotten any takeaways and you haven't done so already,
give this video a thumbs up. It lets me know that you like content like this,
and it really does help my channel.
Thank you so much for being unapologetically ambitious,
for taking this time to invest in yourself, in your professional growth,
and for watching this video. I'll see you in the next one. Bye for now.