Negotiating SalaryHi, I need help in my salary negotiations. Currently i am earning 85K annually. I applied for this job as Sr. Risk Analyst generalist with an asset management (Investment) giant. My background is that I am a software developer with 5-6 yrs of experience. Before the interview the recruiter asked me how much I currently earn and I told the above figure. He told me that the salary for this position will be 80K but you will receive very nice bonus up to 40% depending on the performance because this job is with the investment bank. I told him that at this point i just want to check wheather i am a good fit for the job and vice a versa. I had a 4.5 hr interview with 8 different people. What I am looking for is between 95-100K range. Now I dont know what are my options to negotiate as he already pointed out that this position will pay little less in base salary but the bonus is great. Any help, thanks, There are a couple of things I think you should do. First, I'd politely ask if their offer is negotiable and see what they say. If it's not, I'd be hard pressed to take a cut in base salary, despite the a 40% bonus "depending" on performance. The problem with bonuses is they aren't guaranteed, they're pre-tax income, and if, for some unforeseen reason, the company doesn't do well, bonuses are usually the first things to be cut. So, if there's no room for salary negotiation, I'd hate to hang my hat on a bonus that "depends on performance" - pretty subjective sounds like to me. On the other hand, if the offer is negotiable, I'd counter by saying something like, "I was anticipating an offer in the $95K to $100K range," and see what happens. I'd even be prepared to say I was willing to forego the prospect of a 40% bonus and, if I performed well, would be happy with a bonus not to exceed 20% - higher salary, lower bonus. But I also think you have to be prepared to state why the job itself will be worth that much more to the employer based on how well your skill, experience, past job performance, training, and education match the requirements of the job, which might be hard to do unless there are some transferable skill sets and core competencies between software development and risk analysis! But you'll never know until you ask. Hope this helps. Paul W. Barada The Negotiation Expert Thank you very much for the input.
I think you should also take into consideration that you're switching to a completely different field. 5-6 years of developing software has nothing whatsoever to do with Risk Analysis unless you were developing software in that field. There is more to Risk than just crunching the numbers. So, keep in mind that if you want to switch fields, you may have to take less of an increase than you want. Since you've never done this job at all before, chances are they will bring you in on the low end of their range (the 80K figure). That leaves you room to grow, develop and prove yourself and in this case, you've got a healthy bonus to help you out. Just something to consider. Tess FYI, My work on this job is 80% software development. The data that I am going to deal with is risk analysis and investment data. So from one angle, I still need to help them in software development with the data that I need to learn and understand. The kind of technical skills they would want in their candidate, I fit that very nicely.
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