Your #Career: How Recent #Graduates Can Make More Money At Their First Jobs…Most Employers Surveyed told NerdWallet they Expected #Job Candidates to Ask for More Money and 75% of #Hiring Managers said They had Room to Increase their #Salary Offers by 5% to 10%.

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Long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I landed my first job out of college as an administrative assistant at Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen Litigation Group in Washington, D.C., it didn’t occur to me to try to ask for more money than the piddling $12,000 ($31,000 adjusted for inflation) the hiring manager was offering me. I was an Ivy League grad (Brown) but I had hardly any work experience, aside from a very brief stint volunteering on Dianne Feinstein’s San Francisco mayoral campaign, a project for the Rhode Island state courts and student jobs like chopping green peppers in Brown’s cafeteria kitchen. And the dingy offices (ripped mustard brown wall-to-wall carpet) underlined that this was a nonprofit where jobs didn’t pay well. But mainly, I was too naïve to consider that a salary negotiation was even a possibility.

20 yr old hired

According to a survey released today by the personal finance website NerdWallet, new college graduates haven’t gotten any smarter about entry-level salaries than I was more than 30 years ago. NerdWallet surveyed 8,000 new grads who entered the job market between 2012 and 2015, in addition to 700 employers. Only a little over a third of new grads, 38%, said they had tried to negotiate their pay when they got their first offer.

The survey also showed that those who didn’t try were leaving money on the table. Most employers surveyed told NerdWallet they expected job candidates to ask for more money and three-quarters of hiring managers said they had room to increase their salary offers by 5% to 10%.

After you’ve been given a number, Gaglini suggests the following script: “That’s great news, thank you for the offer, you’ve made my day. I was just wondering if I could ask you a quick question. Might there be some flexibility in the starting salary?” If the employer asks how much more you want to make, again let him name the figure. Say, “I was wondering what you might be able to do.”

Why not try to get more money from that first offer? Like me, most students don’t realize they can, and they don’t know how to negotiate, says Boston College’s associate director of employer relations Louis Gaglini. He always counsels students to do lots of research on their potential job before they even go on their first interview, which should include extensive salary research on sites like Glassdoor, PayScale and Salary.com. Tim Luzader, who runs Purdue University’s career office, encourages his counselees to use LinkedIn to find Purdue alumni who have jobs at the students’ potential employers and to contact them for intelligence on starting salary ranges.

 

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Both Gaglini and Luzader advise students to ask for more money. Even if the offer is at the upper end of what the student has gleaned about starting salaries, it doesn’t hurt to try. But candidate should stick to the rule I’ve written in many other columns: Do not be the first to name a number. If the hiring manager asks you how much you want to make, say you’re thrilled about the job, that you’re sure you can reach an agreement on pay and that you want to make a competitive salary. Pay should be the last thing you negotiate once you have an offer.

After you’ve been given a number, Gaglini suggests the following script: “That’s great news, thank you for the offer, you’ve made my day. I was just wondering if I could ask you a quick question. Might there be some flexibility in the starting salary?” If the employer asks how much more you want to make, again let him name the figure. Say, “I was wondering what you might be able to do.”

If the answer to your initial question is “No,” Gaglini suggests trying to negotiate for other benefits, like a signing bonus or extra vacation days. I think it’s also a good idea to request a salary review within six months.

Luzader agrees with this approach, though he counsels students who’ve done their homework to be more assertive. For instance if the hiring manager offers $40,000, the candidate can say, “In working through the information in the Purdue career center, I learned that the range for this position is usually $42,000 to $46,000.” Says Luzader, “It’s OK to be specific if they’ve done their homework.”

What if the student has a competing offer? Gaglini says candidates should tread carefully. “It’s dangerous to share what another organization is offering and to use that as leverage at the entry level,” he says. “That can really damage your relationship with a potential employer.” Bosses just don’t expect that at the entry level, he says. But Luzader disagrees, at least in most cases. “They can say, ‘I have another offer, it’s also in Chicago, but there’s a $3,500 gap between what you’re offering and the other job.”

Both Gaglini and Luzader agree that it’s important to tread carefully and to listen closely to what the hiring manager says. In one instance Luzader had a student lose out on a job because he was too pushy and he insensitively used email to make demands. “His email looked more like a ransom note than a negotiation,” says Luzader. The email had five bullet points, including a salary demand. “It just sounded like this person was very entitled, almost like they were a free agent for a major league team.”

In the NerdWallet survey, 90% of hiring managers said they had never taken back an offer because an entry-level candidate had tried to negotiate and only 6% said that they were never willing to negotiate salary with new hires.
According to NerdWallet, “an employee who successfully asks for a 5% salary bump on a $40,000 job offer when she is 22, for instance, will make an extra $170,000 by the time she retires at 65.” That’s based on annual 3% salary growth. Though it’s safe to say that virtually no one getting hired out of college today will stay in the same job for 45 years. Still, if you make more money in your first job and leave after even a short time, the confidence a good salary instills will help you negotiate for more in your next job.

Sad to say, but not surprising, NerdWallet found that entry-level women were less likely to negotiate for more money from first job offers than men. Only 34% of women negotiated versus 44% of men. But there is a silver lining for women: when they did ask for a higher base salary, they had the same level of success, 80%, as men.

The takeaway: Do your research, try to ask for more money by posing questions like “Is there flexibility?” rather than making demands, and listen carefully to what the hiring manager says. But do try to negotiate a better salary offer in your first job.

 

Forbes.com | May 6, 2015 | Susan Adams