

Filed in Episodes by on November 22, 2016 5 Comments

josh-doody-100x125-squareMarcus Blankenship talks with Josh Doody about salary negotiation. Topics include a framework for thinking about salary negotiations, how you can know what you’re worth, the employers view of salary negotiation, and missed negotiation opportunities. Also discussed are common fears about negotiating and how to overcome them, common mistakes during negotiations, and how negotiation makes your more desirable as an employee.

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Marcus Blankenship: [00:01:09.09] For Software Engineering Radio, this is Marcus Blankenship. My guest today is Josh Doody. Josh has ten years experience working for talent development companies, in roles from engineering, test to consulting and management.
Today we’re going to be talking about salary negotiation. During his tenure, Josh has learned how companies manage compensation and negotiation. Josh is author of Fearless Salary Negotiation, which is available on Amazon. Welcome, Josh!
Josh Doody: [00:01:39.00] Hi Marcus, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:01:41.13] First let’s start with what is salary negotiation.
Josh Doody: [00:01:46.00] Yes, good question. I would say at the highest level salary negotiation is a conversation usually between a potential employee and a potential employer, to try and discover what the best arrangement is that will make both the employer and the employee satisfied for that employee to do some job for the employer. That’s real vague, but basically it’s a conversation to figure out what’s best for somebody when they’re going to work for a company, to make everybody happy so that they have a good arrangement.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:02:21.22] When do these conversations typically happen?
Josh Doody: [00:02:24.27] There are two primary times that something that most people would refer to as a salary negotiation would happen. The most common one that people would think of is when you’re changing jobs and you’ve got an interview and then you get a job offer, and then you have an opportunity to negotiate your salary to figure out what the best comp package you can get is before you start.
The other time when there’s also a sort of salary negotiation is when a person who’s currently working for a company might reach out to their manager or someone else at the company and say, “Hey, I’d like to talk about increasing my salary for these reasons.” That’s also a different type of negotiation, but it is a salary negotiation.
[00:03:06.06] Those are the main two: when you’re switching jobs, starting a new job, trying to figure out what your comp package looks like, and then if you’re happy at your current job and just trying to figure out if you can get a better salary, then that would also be a salary negotiation.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:03:18.09] Is negotiating my salary the same as negotiating for other things, like the price of a car, negotiating on a home price…? Is it the same techniques, or is there something different about it?
Josh Doody: [00:03:31.21] The answer is sort of yes and no. In a way, all negotiations are similar and usually have common characteristics, but in many ways salary negotiation is unique for almost intangible reasons, but a big one is just there’s so much riding on it. It’s weird to think about, but a salary negotiation could be the highest dollar value thing that a person might negotiate in their life, other than maybe a house or a property. It’s a big deal, but also you don’t get many opportunities at it. Even a really aggressive person would only negotiate salary let’s say ten times in their lifetime, give or take.
[00:04:18.07] It’s different in the sense that there’s sort of more riding on it, and it feels like a heavier thing to do, and every two weeks you see the results of that negotiation in your paycheck.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:04:29.03] Yes, I had never thought about it being maybe the biggest one, because over time it adds up to be such a large amount of money, probably even in comparison to your home or other things.
Josh Doody: [00:04:41.05] For most people that’s true. If you think of the standard rule of thumb for buying a house is you can borrow comfortably up to like two and a half times your annual salary – and I’m not commenting on whether I think that’s good or bad advice, but two and a half times your annual salary, you flip that over and what you’re saying is some time after the two and a half year mark at a company you’re probably earning more than the value of your home. So if you’re at one company for three years plus, then the salary negotiated will be the largest asset or the largest financial vehicle that you’re working with on a regular basis.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:05:18.20] Josh, you brought this up earlier, that a negotiation is a conversation to get to the best outcome, but best for who? I often think about it as best for one side or the other, but is that always true?
Josh Doody: [00:05:33.27] That’s a good question, and I like the way that you framed it. I think a lot of people perceive salary negotiation to be something that you might see in a movie, an aggressive person slamming their fists on the desk, but it is a conversation – or maybe even a better word would be a collaboration where two parties are ultimately trying to figure out what makes both of them comfortable in a situation.
[00:05:59.23] For example, it should be very difficult for a company to pay someone far less than whatever their market value is, and that’s because one person would be significantly losing out there, in this case the employee. The flipside is it’s pretty rare that a company will drastically “overpay” for somebody, in the sense that they’re paying more than they can afford to or want to pay for that person. Usually, that conversation is just about figuring out where exactly is the employer comfortable paying for the services, the value that the person brings to the table, and where is the employee comfortable providing that service for the compensation package that the company offers.
[00:06:44.07] This is just a kind of classic example of the way that prices work in markets; you find the “market clearing price” – where is everybody comfortable? I think there is a win/win there. Especially in a well-done negotiation, everyone leaves the negotiation saying, on the employer side, “I feel good about the salary we’re paying this person. They’ve helped me understand the value they bring to the table and I, as the company, can see the value that they’re bringing to the company and how they make the company better”; from the employee’s side, they’re saying “I’m happy with this compensation package. I’ll be happy to show up for work every day, to do a good job, add value to the company”, and the salary negotiation is an opportunity to have that discussion before the person starts working, so you get to that win/win before they actually start providing that value and start contributing to the company.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:07:34.08] The way you say it, it sounds really reasonable, and yet conversations like this have been tough for me in the past. I know your book is entitled “Fearless Salary Negotiation”, I’m curious why you chose that title. Why did you put the word “fearless” in there? What does that infer?
Josh Doody: [00:07:54.12] I put the word “fearless” in there because I found that the topic of salary negotiation is intimidating to people, and a lot of the conversation that I have even now as a coach – I do a lot of salary negotiation coaching – if not explicitly, implicitly, people I work with will express fear, or that they’re scared of something happening that is either out of their control or that is detrimental to them. A really common fear with salary negotiation is, “If I negotiate, they’re going to retract the job offer.” The company will just say, “Whow-whow-whow… We made you an offer, we’re being very generous making this offer to you, and now you’re trying to negotiate it. That’s not acceptable, offer revoked.”
[00:08:40.10] From the way I said that, you can probably tell that I don’t think that’s a fear that comes to fruition ever, if at all. Very rarely, extremely rarely. But it’s a fear that virtually everyone has, so I wanted to get out in front of that and let people know that there is a way to negotiate salary fearlessly and get rid of those things that scare you. My entire strategy is built around what you described, which is that conversation is a collaboration, and that’s a lot of what I’m trying to help people understand when I talk about this subject. It’s like, “Look, there’s a process that you can follow”, and as somebody who was trained as an engineer, I’m very comfortable with processes, and I think most other engineers are as well. “There’s a process that you can follow that will get you better results by just taking concrete steps and doing discrete things, and I can tell you along the way how we’re mitigating risk at every step, so that there’s less fear involved and you’re less scared, which enables you to negotiate better on your own behalf, which is going to get you a better result in terms of compensation, and hopefully a better arrangement with your employer, that everybody’s happy with.”
Marcus Blankenship: [00:09:47.23] You brought up the idea of the framework, a set of steps, an algorithm if it would be. Can you give us a high-level overview of what that process looks like?
Josh Doody: [00:09:59.00] Sure. The negotiation step one (or maybe step zero) is actually during the interview process, and it’s usually in a pre-screen, or what I call the pre-interview. The negotiation will start in a sneaky way when a company will ask a question that I’m sure most or all of your listeners have heard at least once. The question is usually something like, “So tell me about where you are right now in terms of salary and what you would like if you come to work for us.” They’re asking you for your current salary or your desired salary, or both. For me, that’s the signal of the beginning of the salary negotiation, because they’re trying to set a baseline that they can use later when they’re making you an offer.
[00:10:43.23] The first step to my salary negotiation method is do not disclose those numbers, because it can only work against the candidate. I have yet to find a really compelling reason that it works for the candidate. So that’s step zero, or step one: don’t disclose your current or desired salary when asked for it. Then you kind of fast forward. Now you get past that tricky part of the early interview process and you get into the interview process. Throughout that process, my high-level strategy is your job as a candidate is to help the company understand that they will be better if you’re a part of it. The way I describe that is you’re telling a story about how the company will be better if you’re on their team. Through the whole interview process, everything you do is designed to emphasize that, and the reason this is effective is that remember, you haven’t disclosed your desired salary or your current salary, so what you’re doing is convincing the company that 1) they should make you a job offer, but 2) they need to make you a strong job offer, so you’re more compelled to come on board.
[00:11:46.07] You want to switch the company’s thinking from “What’s the minimum that we can offer Josh to get him to take this job?” to “What do we need to offer Josh to convince him to take this job and get him on board?” There’s a subtle difference there, but it’s a big difference in terms of the kind of offers that you’ll get. Once you get an offer – just before you get an offer, actually – you want to do a step that I call “setting your minimum acceptable salary.” This is just sitting down and being honest with yourself and saying, “What’s the minimum salary that I require to take the job as I understand it?”
[00:12:16.23] You’re doing this early, so that your judgment is not clouded by big numbers that might be thrown at you, especially in terms of “total comp.” Companies will offer not just base salary, but they’ll say “Your total comp is $300,000”, and they’re rolling a whole bunch of things in there that are not things that you can pay your mortgage with, like base salary. So you set your minimum accepted salary, then you get an offer, and now you have your baseline that you’re shooting for, which is “I want to at least meet or exceed my minimum acceptable salary, so that I have a win/win”, which is something you and I talked about earlier. This is the way the employee can get to a win/win, which is they either don’t go to work for the company, because the company could not meet their minimum acceptable number, or they do go to work for the company and meet or exceed their minimum acceptable number. Both of those are a win, because it’s pretty obvious – at least to me – that if you can’t meet that minimum, then you shouldn’t work there. It’s not a good arrangement for whatever reason.
[00:13:10.00] Once you have the number that they’ve offered you, and you’re ready to negotiate and you can negotiate in a way that will get you above your minimum, then you’re going to counter-offer somewhere between 10%-20% above their offer. Again, their offer is floating, because you have not given them things to baseline against, like your current salary or your desired salary. So they’re making you an offer that’s designed to convince you to take the job, which is presumably somewhere in the upper end of the range of money they can offer you. Then your counter offer is designed to say, “Well, can you go a little bit higher in that range?” So you’re kind of closer to 20% if you detect that the company really wants to bring you on board, they’re desperate to fill this position, somebody just left two weeks ago and they have to fill it right now or productivity is going to fall; closer to 10% if maybe you’re just feeling things out and they’re feeling things out, and there’s no particular motivation for them to bring you on right now, and they’re just trying to see if you might be a good fit in the future.
[00:14:06.03] Once you’ve countered, then they’re going to respond to it. Usually, they’ll respond somewhere between your initial offer and your counter-offer, and then you want to make sure that you keep your foot on the gas, negotiate all the way through to the end, try and push your base salary up the best you can, and this is also the time when you get to negotiate fun things like vacation and signing bonuses and things like that. As you peg your base salary, if the company doesn’t come up to whatever you asked for, there’s an opportunity for you to say, “Well, I asked for this and you didn’t quite come up there. Can you do that base salary you just said AND an extra week of paid vacation every year? If you can do that, I’m on board.” Once you’ve hashed out all those final details, you’ve got a final comp package and usually you’ll accept that package and start.
[00:14:47.28] That was kind of long-winded, but that’s an end-to-end salary negotiation strategy overview for what I do when I work with people and what I wrote about in my book.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:14:56.22] That’s fantastic. Just in hearing you describe it, there were things you said that I internally thought to myself, “I’m not sure I could do that.” If we go back to one of the first things you said, which is when you’re asked – and this has happened to me, and I suspect to a lot of our listeners… When you’re asked for your current pay, or maybe your desired pay – I think both recruiters and the companies as for this – you suggest not giving this as a baseline number. How do you decline to provide that information? What words do you use such that it doesn’t shut the conversation off?
Josh Doody: [00:15:38.09] Excellent question. I call it “the dreaded salary question”, and just to zoom back for everybody who’s listening – that question is usually phrased something like this: “So where are you right now in terms of salary, and what would you like if you come on board with us? What would you hope to make?” That’s the two-part question that we’re talking about here, and essentially what they’re saying is “What is your current salary and what is your desired salary if you come on board?”
[00:16:03.20] The way to answer this question – the first answer to this question (the easy one) is, to take the current salary part, “I’m not comfortable discussing my current salary. I prefer to focus on the value that I can add to this company and the opportunity that’s in front of me.” That’s a nice little script that you can use to move on from the current salary question. For the desired salary, you can say “I prefer to focus on the value that I can add to this company, and I want this move to be a big step forward for me in terms of both responsibility and compensation.”
[00:16:39.11] Remember, in the interview you’re telling a story about how the company will be better if you’re a part of it. A subtle way that you could do that is to say, “I don’t want to disclose my desired salary because I don’t know, but I do want to focus on how I can add value to your company”, so explicitly saying you want to make the company better, and “I want to do that by taking on more responsibility for you, (which is a good signal to send) and I want my compensation to reflect that additional responsibility that I’m taking on.” All you’re doing the entire time is pushing forward. “I want to move forward in responsibility and compensation.”
[00:17:11.00] That’s my baseline script for addressing that question. That will work most of the time. Most of the time, whoever asked the question will say, “Okay, I tried, but Josh isn’t comfortable with that, so moving on to schedule that first interview.”
Marcus Blankenship: [00:17:26.24] Have you encountered situations where there was a second or third request for that? Maybe under the idea of “Well, I have to write this on this form, it is a box I have to check and fill it in. I need to put something down here.” Or is that just my fear coming through that they’re going to ask twice.
Josh Doody: [00:17:49.24] That’s not just your fear coming through, that happens… I wouldn’t say frequently, but it’s not unusual. I find that this is a combination of sort of company policy and also the individual person that you’re talking to. Some recruiters will ask – and I think they’re just asking because it’s on their list of things to do when you’re screening a candidate, is take a shot at getting that information. If you resist one time, they’ll say “Eh…”, kind of shrug and move on. Some recruiters are a lot more aggressive and they’ll say, “No, I have to have this or we cannot move forward with this process.” I’ve heard that line a number of times, kind of vicariously through people that I’ve coached, and somehow it always sort of magically turns out that we’ll look back later in the process and say, “Huh! We didn’t end up disclosing that information and yet we were able to move on through the process, even though they ‘had to have’ that.”
[00:18:38.18] It helps from the candidate side to think of this as a negotiation tactic, because that’s what it is. They’re trying to get information that they can use to make an offer, again, in the vein of “What’s the minimum that we need to offer this person to bring them on?” It’s hard to say this without sounding like I’m sort of implying there’s some sort of nefarious motivation here on their part; they’re just trying to look out for the company’s bottom line and get a good value where they can. That’s what they’re trying to do – “What’s the minimum that I need to offer this person?”
[00:19:12.13] By telling them your current salary and your desired salary, you’re giving them really good data, that will help them to determine what’s that minimum. You want to avoid that, so that they think, “What do I have to offer this person to convince them to come on board?” and you’re not giving them those easy-out cues of current and desired salary. If they keep pushing, I found that you can give pretty compelling answers that are almost irrefutable, and that most reasonable people will accept. For the current salary, a good answer is “I don’t want to tell you what my current salary is because that is sort of proprietary HR information about my current company and how they compensate their employees, and I don’t think that they would appreciate me sharing that information with a competitor”, which you’re almost certainly interviewing with a competitor of some sort, at least a competitor for talent. I think that’s a compelling reason and it’s hard to argue against it; you’re taking a moral stand there, which is “I’m just not comfortable disclosing proprietary information from the company I worked for.”
[00:20:08.01] Implicitly, you’re saying “I don’t know for sure that I’m going to work for you. I do know for sure that my company would not appreciate me sharing that information.” That’s almost always true, unless you work for a company like Buffer, where this is all public. Then on the desired salary side, if they continue to push and continue to push – usually what they’ll say is, “Well, I need to qualify you for a range, so that we’re not wasting anybody’s time.” Again, if you frame this and you understand this as a negotiation tactic, then it makes it a lot easier to see what’s going on there; they’re trying to get that number. What you can say in response to that is, “I don’t know exactly what I would like to make, but if you’re trying to qualify me for a range, I’m happy to respond to that range and tell you if it’s in the ballpark.”
[00:20:50.27] That’s usually the hardest push that they’ll make, “I want to qualify you for a range so we’re not wasting time.” A good response to that is, “Okay, why don’t you tell me what that range is and I’ll tell you if we’re in the ballpark. Then you know if I’m qualified or not qualified and we can just move on.” I like that answer, by the way; it’s a little sneaky, but by simply saying, “Yes, your range is in the ballpark”, you are not boxing yourself into that range and still leave yourself wide open to negotiate effectively later on, while giving them what they “need” in order to continue the negotiation.
[00:21:20.25] That’s my long answer to how to respond to the dreaded salary question, and while I’m thinking about it, Marcus, I’ll send you a link… I have an article that’s written on that with that script that we talked about earlier. I’ll share that with you so that you can put it in the show notes or use it however you like.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:21:38.13] Yes, we’ll put that in the show notes. Josh, you’ve brought up two things here, and I want to drill into them. It was around the idea of ethical considerations almost – are there ethics in negotiation?
Josh Doody: [00:21:52.29] There are ethics, but I don’t think it’s a huge component. At the end of the day, a negotiation occasionally will veer into ethical territory; usually the ethical things are about information disclosure and how this negotiation might impact parties who are uninvolved. Again, “Not disclosing my current comp because now I’m telling you what my current company pays people like me, and that’s useful information that could give you an advantage over them in some way, and I don’t work for you, I work for them, so I don’t want to share that information.”
[00:22:27.04] It’s much less ethical and moral than it is a sort of straightforward business value discussion. There are a lot of shows now on TV, like Shark Tank and The Profit, and they’re helping make this clear to people who watch. The company’s job is to make a profit, your job/role as a person is to make a living, and you’re just having a business discussion about “Okay, how can I enable the company to make more profit and in term be compensated for my contributions there?” I see it as a conversation/collaboration in a business discussion between two parties who are trying to figure out “What’s the right arrangement here for us, the business, to continue making a profit or to make more profit, or do better business because we’re bringing this person on board?” and for the employee to decide, “What’s the value of my time and my expertise to make me comfortable contributing to their goal of making a profit?”
Marcus Blankenship: [00:23:27.04] I have heard people feel sometimes that they were being greedy, or maybe they were even being unethical by trying to negotiate for a good salary. Is there a sense that it’s not right to push too hard, that it’s not right to negotiate for a high salary? Or is that something that is more a fear than it is a real ethical boundary?
Josh Doody: [00:23:58.09] It’s more a fear than an ethical boundary. Some crafty companies will sort of spin the negotiations as though you are having an ethical or moral conversation. Again, I perceive that to be a negotiation tactic. This often happens with smaller companies and startups. Even recently – I’m not going to name the company, but I’m coaching somebody through a negotiation right now with a public tech company that’s doing pretty well, and they’re putting the pressure on in terms of, “Well, we just can’t really afford to pay you market rate because we’re really strapped for cash.” That is kind of true, but it’s also a matter of understanding that the company is working to make a profit, and when they’re bringing someone in, that person’s job is to contribute to making a profit. That’s what shareholders want, that’s usually the endgame.
[00:24:52.19] I think it’s more of a fear that people have that they might offend someone, and that’s them projecting their negotiating with a company for a salary onto a recruiter that they’re having a conversation with and feeling awkward about putting the recruiter or the hiring manager in an uncomfortable position. But you have to model that recruiter or hiring manager as a part of the company that they work for. The more you see it as a process, a business conversation, the more obvious it is that it’s not an ethical thing, it’s not that you’re trying to steal money from somebody; you’re trying to find the right price for the value that you bring to the company.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:25:31.28] Alright, let’s leave that topic and talk about market rate. You’ve discussed this briefly, you used the phrase. What is market rate, and how is it important in salary negotiations?
Josh Doody: [00:25:49.07] Market rate – this could easily veer off into this wonky economics discussion that would be really boring. I’d say at the really highest level, a market rate is just “What’s the typical amount that companies pay for somebody to do a job and bring the kind of skillset and experience to the table that you do?” If we’re talking about your market rate, Marcus’ or Josh’s market rate – that market rate is what do companies generally pay for the expertise that this person brings to the table? At the highest level that’s what it is, and of course, it gets a little bit more refined.
[00:26:27.07] I break it down into three tiers. There’s the industry market rate, or the broad market rate. If we looked at everybody who’s a software engineer in the country with five years of experience in these technologies, what’s the market rate? What are they typically getting paid? Of course, you can see right away that there are some problems there, like “Do they work in Miami or do they work in San Francisco?” The market rate is going to be different based on geography.
[00:26:54.15] Then you can start to narrow it down and say, “Well, I’m going to work for a company that’s on the West Coast” or “I’m going to work for a company that’s in the Midwest”, so what’s the market rate if I narrow it down from the high-level industrial rate to that geographic area? These days people work remotely, but I find that most companies are still more or less setting salaries based on where they operate, because their cost of doing business is driven by the piece of property that they physically sit on, and most of the people they hire will be from around that geographic area.
[00:27:26.11] You start with your industry-wide market rate – what’s the general salary paid to somebody with five years of experience with this thing? And then, what are companies in this geographic area paying those types of people? Maybe I meet someone at a trade show or a conference, maybe I can find out even more detailed information about what specific companies that are similar to my company or the company I’m targeting – what are they paying people? Then the last level is, if you can get it, information on what is the specific company that I’m interviewing with or working at paying people with my type of experience in this industry right now?
[00:28:03.02] The market rate is a very broad and narrow thing at the same time. It’s broad in terms of “What’s the general average?”, all the way down to “What does this specific company pay somebody with my level of experience and what I bring to the table to do this job?”
Marcus Blankenship: [00:28:17.29] Do I need to know my market rate as I enter into a negotiation? How does that affect what I say and do, my expectations maybe?
Josh Doody: [00:28:28.01] Yes, you should know your market rate if you can determine it, and most of the time you can. The reason is earlier, when I gave my end-to-end overview of salary negotiation strategy I talked about the minimum acceptable salary. Your market rate should impact your minimum acceptable salary, meaning when you’re deciding “What is the minimum dollar amount that I’ll accept to do this job?” A component of that is “What is the market rate for doing the job?” and then you’ll finesse it based on things you know about this specific company or the opportunity, and things like that.
[00:29:02.14] Your baseline for your minimal acceptable salary is your market rate. “What does somebody that look like me, with my experience – what are they making in this industry right now?” Then you would take that number as your baseline and say, “Okay, how excited am I for this opportunity? What’s the upside for my career long-term? How bad is the commute? What does the team seem like? What does the opportunity look like in terms of maybe getting exposure to new technologies or processes that I can’t get at other companies?” and all those good things. You roll them all up together into your minimum acceptable salary before you get that job offer, so you can position yourself for a win/win when you negotiate. That market rate should be your first step in setting your minimum acceptable salary.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:29:44.06] So your minimum acceptable salary might be different per company. It’s not simply one number that represents you; it sounds like it takes into account a lot about the company that you’re applying for.
Josh Doody: [00:29:58.11] That’s right. You can set a broad minimum. The minimum might be “What is the amount of money that I need to bring in every month for me to provide for my family?” for example; that would be a nice way to think about a minimum. But then you would say, “Okay, so I know what that number is. Now I need to think about how do I adjust that number for this particular opportunity that’s in front of me?”
I am coaching someone right now who is negotiating with two companies at the same time. They’ve got offers on hand from both companies and we’re trying to get the best offer from both companies. They have a different minimum for each company, because the opportunities are drastically different: the short-term and long-term career effects are different, the commute is different, and all those things. You start with a baseline and then you would have a minimum for each company that you’re talking to.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:30:51.14] You had a very nicely defined larger process that you move through in this. Is it different negotiating with a large company than a small company?
Josh Doody: [00:31:04.20] The answer is yes and no. The process that I described is effective for large and small companies, but small companies and large companies usually have different things that are important to them. In particular, I find that the larger the company you’re working with, the more opinionated about the negotiation the large company will be. Some companies prefer to negotiate on equity, and it’s hard to get away from that, for example.
Smaller companies also like to try and focus on equity, but small companies tend to emphasize the fact that they’re small, they don’t have a lot of capital, and “Do you want to be a part of building something big?” is the story that you have with smaller companies.
[00:31:50.13] Broad strokes, the process I described is effective at large and small companies, it’s built that way. I spent a ton of time when I was developing that process. That particular chapter on negotiating salaries from my book – I rewrote it top to bottom three times, because I wanted to make a process that could be more or less universal. It’s designed so that if you use the process as I’ve described it, it will be effective for you. I’m also finding ways that I can finesse that process with different companies and different requirements. Big and small companies do behave differently, but the process itself is effective for both large and small companies.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:32:27.26] That’s great. Is there ever a time I shouldn’t negotiate my salary?
Josh Doody: [00:32:33.22] I’ve thought about this off and on, since I started writing my book, really. Because I advocate that you should always negotiate salaries, so I’m always questioning absolute statements like that. I have yet to find a situation where the answer is that you should not negotiate your salary. The reason is that if you’re following the process I described, then you end up at a place where the companies make you an offer – they’re making an offer not quite in a vacuum, but they don’t have those handy-dandy guidelines to use in your current and desired salary. So they’re sort of feeling out what it’s going to take to convince you to come on board.
[00:33:12.09] Your question as somebody who’s received a job offer is always going to be, “Okay, that’s a good offer, but is it the best offer that I can get?” The only way to really know if that’s the best offer is to negotiate it. Sometimes it does happen where I’ll work with clients, we’ll begin negotiating, we’ll do some things, we’ll get a firm offer on hand, we’ll negotiate that offer, and what we’ll find out is we have convinced them to make us the best possible offer, and they will not budge on that offer.
[00:33:42.16] The counter-offer part of the negotiation doesn’t always move the needle, but we did things up until that point to make sure that we did get to the place where we’re confident that we’ve got the best possible offer on hand. That’s also salary negotiation. It’s important to take a broader view on salary negotiation. The negotiation is not simply making a counter-offer; it’s refusing to disclose your current desired salary, it’s setting your minimum beforehand, it’s excelling in the interview process, it’s sometimes getting companies to negotiate against themselves. There are ways that, without counter-offering, you can get an offer to become a better offer from a company. But the ultimate goal is to figure out “What’s the best possible offer that this company will make me?” In other words, “What’s the most this company is comfortable paying me for the service and the value that I provide?” That’s your goal in the negotiation, to get there.
[00:34:34.24] Within that framework, negotiating is always the right answer, because even though sometimes you will run into a wall, you’ll find that you’ve maximized the potential there. Now you know that for sure, which means that when you take that job you can be confident that “I got the best possible offer that I was going to get. I did the best I could in the negotiation, and I can be confident that when I show up for the first day of work that I didn’t leave money on the table there inadvertently.”
Marcus Blankenship: [00:35:00.03] As somebody who’s been a poor negotiator with my employers in the past, a lot of what you’re saying is making me think back to times when I didn’t do these things, and I don’t know that I ever started a job resenting that I made too little, but I certainly wondered if I could’ve gotten more. Do you find that if people don’t negotiate and they simply accept the offer — clearly, your book and everything about what you’re telling us is we should be negotiating, but is the downside to us not doing that just that we don’t get as much money, or is there a real fear that we might be resentful or unhappy at the new employer?
Josh Doody: [00:35:43.22] It’s a combination of the two. Everybody would prefer to know that they’re making whatever their potential to make is, especially when we’re talking about money and paying bills and providing for a family and things like that. It’s important to have that peace of mind. That’s the first part there.
Then there’s the regret piece that you mentioned, where you might show up at a job and eventually, if you’re underpaid relatively to what you could have commanded with a strong negotiation strategy, you will probably figure that out one way or another. You might notice somebody who does the same job you do is driving a much nicer car than you are. They could have gone into debt to do that, but they also may just be making more money and can afford a nicer car. You’ll also hear watercooler conversations, sometimes things slip out. Somebody may not say, “I’m making such and such amount”, but they might say something that your eyebrow raises and you say, “Wait a minute… If that’s true, then he/she must be getting paid more than I am.” That’s just not a good feeling to have.
[00:36:50.28] You want to maximize the salary that you get paid, but you also want to minimize the chance that you’ll get into the job, get six months in and realize, “Oh man, I left a bunch of money on the table, and now that I’m at the company it’s going to be challenging to make up that ground because of company dynamics and bureaucracy and those sorts of things.”
Marcus Blankenship: [00:37:38.06] I want to get into this idea of negotiating after you’re at the company, but before we drive that direction, I’d like to briefly touch on the parts of the salary component that we have an opportunity to discuss in our negotiation. You’ve mentioned a few non-monetary pieces, and I’m curious if you could walk through – do you have a standard list of those pieces that we can use as leverage to move in our negotiation?
Josh Doody: [00:38:06.07] I do have a standard list, but I also defer to whoever I’m working with. I typically say you should start by focusing on base salary. For me personally, maximizing base salary rises above all else in terms of priority. The reason is that you can pay your mortgage with base salary, you can make a car payment with base salary. You can’t do that with stock options. So I usually start with base salary.
Paid vacations seems to be very popular; I like that as somebody who thinks about the dollars in the sense of negotiation because the paid vacation time does have an actual real-world value. You know what a week of work is worth, so you know what the value of that vacation is, and it’s also more or less pegged to your base salary. So those are the first two.
[00:38:54.13] Then signing bonuses and/or relocation stipends for situation where you have to move across the country or relocate; people like to negotiate on those. Then you’ve got other much smaller things, like getting your company to pay your cable bill or your cell phone bill, or if you out of a co-working space, getting them to pay that monthly lease amount. This is all done in what I call the final discussion, but it’s after you’ve counter-offered and the company comes back and says, “Well, we hear your counter. We can’t quite meet your counter, so here’s what we’re willing to do”, and that’s when you start going back and forth, seeing how far you can push your base salary, and then you work down.
[00:39:27.17] The first one or two things in your priorities list is “Once I’ve maximized base salary, if I don’t get to where I want to get, what are the other things that are important to me that I’ll go after?” Usually the first is paid vacation, and then we go from there.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:39:43.10] As you talked through those, I was imagining a previous employer, a particular boss, and the fear that at some point he would say, “It’s just not worth it. We just don’t need someone who’s going to want to negotiate this hard” and retract the offer. You’ve said you don’t see that happen very often. Is it a real problem? Am I the only one that fears that?
Josh Doody: [00:40:11.14] It’s a real problem in the sense that everyone is afraid of it. It’s a very common fear that people have, that they’re going to negotiate and then the company will say “I just don’t want to deal with this person. Never mind, offer off the table.”
I think though that I can make a pretty compelling case that will help most people see why that fear is extremely unlikely to come to fruition. I’m hedging a little bit, I can’t say for sure that you will run into a particular recruiter who just really had a bad week and they’re just not interested in negotiating, but I have not experienced this with anyone that I’ve coached, I haven’t seen it happen.
[00:40:47.15] A lot of people have read my book, and I’m not getting e-mail from people saying “I had a job offer retracted.” I got one e-mail from one person who said, “You said that companies won’t retract the offer if you negotiate. I had an offer retracted”, and when I asked some follow-up questions to understand their situation better – I’m trying to say this diplomatically – I’m not convinced that the reason their offer was retracted was that they negotiated. That’s one sample, and I’ve sold hundreds of copies of my book. It just doesn’t happen.
[00:41:16.18] However, people are afraid of it, and this goes back to the overarching reason for fear in salary negotiations, which is we don’t get many opportunities to do this; you only get a few at best throughout your career, you don’t want to mess it up, so anything that we perceive as something that could cause a deal to evaporate is a very big deal for us, because that could be one of the very few opportunities we have to get a good job. It’s a legitimate fear that people have, because we understand how people work; I personally would not like someone to negotiate against me if I offered them something, but salary negotiations are different, they’re unique. We’re trying to find that happy medium.
[00:41:56.12] Why don’t I think that companies are prone to retracting job offers? The short answer is, back to the company’s job of making a profit – dollars and cents are important to companies; by the time you get a job offer from a company, they have typically invested if not thousands, tens of thousands of dollars sometimes in recruiting you and getting to the point where they have extended a real offer to you. Often just in man hours, they’ve usually burnt thousands of dollars; you’ve talked to a recruiter for an hour or two, you’ve have one, two, three, up to a dozen interviews with various hiring managers and sometimes people up to the SVP, director, sea-level people… Those people’s time is extremely valuable. They’ve invested resources in posting the job requisition, and all these other things. They’re spending lots and lots of money. They might have flown you on-site – that could be thousands of dollars, right?
[00:42:45.03] You get to a point where they make you an offer – they’ve invested significant money in getting to the point where they can make you that offer, so from their perspective this is a pretty big investment that they’re making. When they make you an offer, they’re not inclined to just basically light that investment on fire and get rid of it because you said, “You know, you made me an offer, I appreciate that. I’d be more comfortable if we could do this other thing.” Because, back to my strategy, I’m not pounding fists on the table and demanding things; I’m saying, “I would be more comfortable if… We could work together better if…”, right? So you’re collaborating with them.
[00:43:18.28] All that combined – the huge investment that they’re making upfront, the fact that they have a real need to fill this position or they wouldn’t be wasting their time talking to you, and the fact that you’re collaborating with them and just trying to find the best result, results in just an extremely high likelihood that they’re going to continue negotiating with you even when you counter.
[00:43:38.04] The worst case scenario, in 99.99% of situations is you negotiate, you counter offer, and they say, “Oh no, we already made you our best offer, it’s non-negotiable.” Now you know you got the best offer possible, you know what the best offer is and you can choose to accept it or not, usually based on your minimum acceptable salary.
[00:43:59.01] I think it’s a real fear, and it’s based on the way that we interact interpersonally with each other as humans, but the dollars and cents for a business don’t really work out for them to invest that much to get to the point where they make you an offer and then just pull the offer because you said you’d be more comfortable if they could adjust the offer in these ways.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:44:17.23] That makes complete sense. Do companies expect us to negotiate? How do they view strong negotiators?
Josh Doody: [00:44:25.20] Most companies do expect people to negotiate, or they at least allow for the possibility that you’ll negotiate. It’s pretty rare that a company’s first offer will be their best and final possible offer. I’ve seen it happen — I’ve done it one time when I was a hiring manager; there was one instance where I made an offer to someone and I said, “Just so you know, we think you’re perfect for this position, we’re not messing around. This is our best offer”, and I was being honest about that, and we ended up hiring that person at that rate.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:44:56.22] How do companies view good negotiators? Is it viewed as a negative thing, or do companies look on it as a positive attribute?
Josh Doody: [00:45:12.08] Right, that was the second part of the question. In terms of how companies perceive people who negotiate, I think it’s hard to say for sure. I can make a pretty good case though that they would perceive someone who knows their own value and has made a strong case of the value that they bring to the company, and then negotiates strongly on their own behalf – most businesses will perceive that person to be a strong asset that they would like to have on their team, because if they’re this prepared for a negotiation, if they’re this focused on understanding the value that they add, then if they bring that same intensity to the job at hand, they’re going to be a good asset.
[00:45:52.19] As I mentioned earlier, businesses usually exist to make a profit, and people who are business-savvy enough to negotiate a salary in an intelligent and collaborative way are probably going to be the type of people who have skills that will enable the company to make more profit using that skill set. I think on balance, companies would perceive a good negotiator – again, not somebody who’s just pounding fists on desks and making demands, but collaborating and doing a strong negotiation, standing out in the interview – as being an asset that they would like to bring onto the team.
[00:46:27.24] People who don’t negotiate – I wouldn’t say that it’s a red flag, but you miss an opportunity to show what you could really do in terms of thinking through hard problems, and negotiation is a challenging problem to solve, it’s challenging to do it well. If you can demonstrate that you can do it well, be intentional with it, have good reasoning, make good arguments, then that’s a good signal to the company that “This is a competent business person who can come in and bring some business acumen to whatever job they’re doing.”
Marcus Blankenship: [00:46:57.13] When I was hiring manager of engineers we definitely thought that engineers who could negotiate well were an asset. We felt like their ability to persuade and think through and have tenacity and know what they wanted, those were the kind of people we wanted at our company. Many engineers, as you say, are afraid that they’ll be considered high-maintenance or difficult if they negotiate, or they will look bad upon them, and yet for me, what you say really resonates that the opposite was true. We looked upon those people – even if we ended up paying them more or maybe if we didn’t, the fact that they approached the situation that way was a very positive thing.
[00:47:43.07] I’d like to turn now to the other time you mention when we will be negotiating. We’ve talked about when we join a company, that initial offer. But once you’re in the door, and having spent 14 years at an enterprise company, I spent far more time getting salary increases than I did my initial onboarding. I’m curious… Let’s talk about that opportunity – sometimes annually – to negotiate your salary at the evaluation or the raise time. Is there an opportunity to negotiate? That’s my first question; I don’t know that I ever perceived there was when I worked at a large company. What does your experience show?
Josh Doody: [00:48:30.29] You came at this question from exactly the right perspective, which is most people are aware that there’s an annual opportunity to, if not discuss compensation, to adjust it, at most companies. The question about whether that’s a good time to discuss a raise or to negotiate is based on a couple of things. The big one is “Is there budget available?” That question will have different answers at different companies.
First let me take one step back and just say, to be clear, we’re talking about not your standard “You’ve been here another year, here’s 1,5%-2%. Thanks for being part of our company”, but we’re talking about “I want a 10% or 15% raise. I want a market adjustment. My salary is out of line with the value that I add and I want to make a significant adjustment, not just a boilerplate, standard adjustment.”
[00:49:22.13] The way that you know whether or not it’s negotiable in that particular window is “Is there budget for it?” and a good rule of thumb for whether there’s budget is essentially, does everyone in your company go through that process you described (the raise, the merit increase, performance review process) at the same time every year? Or is it done ad-hoc, or is it based on anniversary date from when people are hired?
[00:49:48.22] If everyone is going through that process at the same time every year, more likely than not there’s going to be a fixed budget at the corporate level that is then sliced up by business division or department, and then sliced up again by manager. So there’s not quite fixed, but more or less a fixed budget that’s available. This is a case where it is sort of zero-sum. In that case, if I get a 10% raise and the average raise is 2%, either several people are going to get nothing, or a lot of people are going to get slightly less than 2% to compensate for the fact that I’m gobbling up some of that budget for my 10%.
[00:50:27.00] The answer is there’s really not additional or real budget available for market adjustments and large raises to negotiate, so that’s not a great time to pursue that. On the other hand, if you’re either ad-hoc — some companies are going to this system where it’s like “You come talk to us when you’d like to talk about a raise” or “We’ll schedule some time with you if we have a performance review feedback for you.” Or if it’s anniversary-based, which means “Every year on the anniversary of your start date we’re going to evaluate your performance and talk about salary”, then usually there’s not a fixed budget, so you can make your case for your own budget to be allocated. It’s a little bit more bureaucratic, there’s more red tape, more approvals that need to be done, but there isn’t that fixed budget that you’re fighting for a piece of. Instead, you can kind of make your own budget.
[00:51:18.07] Those are the first levels: is there budget? How do you? A good rule of thumb is “If everybody in my company gets raises and promotions at the same time?
– probably no budget there, so you should go off cycle, wait till six months out, right in the middle between those two and there may be budget there. For everybody else, if it’s ad-hoc or anniversary-based, there probably is budget.
I think that was more or less your question – when is a good time to do it? Yes, you can negotiate for a higher salary; you should wait until there is a budget. The last thing I’ll say on that is you should also be aware that you mentioned being in an enterprise for 14 years – I’m not sure if your company was like this, but a lot of larger enterprise companies will have created essentially a rubric that they’ll use to decide how much of a raise any one person in the company can get at a time. I worked at a large enterprise company where the answer was “If you move up one pay grade, for a promotion, you can get a 4% raise. If you move up two pay grades, to get a two pay grade promotion, you can get a 7,5%.” Anything above 7,5% – it wasn’t impossible, but it was really hard to do without moving mountains. It really helps to be aware of that, and hopefully your manager can tell you “Are there strict constraints on the amount of a raise that someone can get in one move at this company, or is it all handled ad-hoc?”
Marcus Blankenship: [00:52:34.22] Is that okay to ask?
Josh Doody: [00:52:36.15] Yes. Usually, if you’re pursuing a raise or a promotion, you’ll put together a case, and before you send that written case you’ll talk to your manager and have a conversation and say, “Here’s my goal for this job title that I’m pursuing or this raise amount that I’m pursuing. Here’s why I think I’ve earned that goal. Can you tell me what we can do to make this happen and what sort of timeline we’re looking at?” Part of that conversation would be hopefully collaborating with your manager to see what’s available and then finding out whether there’s some sort of system in place, a framework that prevents someone from getting an extraordinary raise at this company. Most of the time your manager will know that and will be able to either find out or communicate it to you. It’s pretty rare that that kind of thing is totally secret. In that conversation you can usually learn that from your manager if that’s the case.
Marcus Blankenship: [00:53:31.04] With the enterprise that I’ve worked at, you’re exactly right – we had an annual evaluation; there was an annual time for a salary increase, and it was a salary pool, so I took a piece of the pie. But I am hearing more and more – and you mentioned this – companies big and small don’t have this regular schedule of times to discuss it. Instead, they leave it up to the employee. If you do work someplace without a regularly scheduled time to discuss salary and increases, how do you know when you should do that, and how do you open that conversation? Because it seems kind of intimidating.
Josh Doody: [00:54:12.09] This is where my method is built for this situation that you described. When I’m coaching people or I teach a class sometimes to walk people through this process, the taking control of that situation and making a good case for yourself is paramount. You may bump into these other constraints, but the ability to do that effectively is what’s key. The way that you do that is by essentially reverse-engineering the raise or promotion that you’re pursuing. I can talk about both at the same time. Raises and promotions are separate things in my mind, and I wrote them as separate chapters in my book. But the process, the actual steps that you take to get a raise or a promotion are virtually identical.
[00:54:53.18] In both cases, where you start is “What is it specifically that I’m asking for? What is the target job that I believe I’m ready to be promoted to? What is the target salary that I have in mind?” Of course, that target salary would be based on your market value research and things like that. The idea is that you want to know specifically what you’re asking for. A main reason for that is you want to make it easy on your manager.
Marcus, you were a hiring manager so you probably had some of these conversations. It’s much easier to talk about raises and promotions with somebody who comes to you and says, “I would like a raise to this amount” or “I would like a promotion to this job”, than it is to talk with somebody who comes to you and says, “I want more money.” It’s hard to have that conversation, because the first question is “How much more and why?” Those are the two questions that the manager has.
[00:55:38.18] Your job as an employee who’s seeking a raise or a promotion is to make that manager’s job as easy as possible by setting a very clear goal, and then before you ever have that conversation, making a very good case that you have already demonstrated that you’ve achieved that goal, that you’re ready for that goal.
In the case of a promotion it’s sort of easy; it’s not easy to actually execute, but it’s easy to envision or to plan for, and that is “What’s the next job in my career path?” or “What’s the job that I’m targeting if I want to make a move outside of my career path into a different area? What are the responsibilities associated with that job and what’s the difference between those responsibilities and my current job’s published responsibilities?”
[00:56:19.14] That difference, that delta between the job you’re targeting and the job you’re doing, that’s the stuff that you need to do to demonstrate that you’re ready to be promoted. This may be a little counter-intuitive to people. People like to believe that companies promote based on potential, and “This guy’s a real go-getter, so I’m going to go ahead and promote him into this job that’s above his current job, and he’ll grow into that role.” That almost never happens.
[00:56:44.04] Looking at it from a manager’s perspective, the manager is looking for somebody who can demonstrate that they can do the job right now, because managers are busy people and they’re looking for things to help them be better at their jobs and manage the resources better in terms of what’s available at the company.
So you set your goal and then you make a case that “I’ve already done everything I need to achieve that goal. I’m already doing the target job that I’m going to ask my manager for” or “I can demonstrate very clearly that this raise I’m asking for is already justified by the work that I’m doing above and beyond what was expected of me last time my salary was set.”
[00:57:20.29] As I’m talking, you can probably see… Like I said, reverse-engineer this idea that “What am I going to ask for specifically?” and then “What is the evidence that the thing I’m asking for is currently deserved right now by me?” When you have all those things packaged up and ready to go, then you can go talk to your manager and say, “I would like a promotion to this job because all the reasons that I’ve demonstrated that I’m already doing that job and I’m ready for the promotion.” Or “I would like a raise to this amount because…” and you list all the things you’re doing to add additional value to the company, to your team, to save money or make extra money for the company or the team”, since the last time your salary was set.
[00:57:59.27] That’s my process or my method in a nutshell – set your target, do the work to demonstrate that you have already achieved that target, and then you’re essentially just going to talk to your manager to say, “Here’s what I’ve done, here’s what I would like to do to make it official. Can we talk about a timeline for making that happen?”
Marcus Blankenship: [00:58:19.08] Yes, as a hiring manager I certainly found it was much less risky to promote someone who I could see was taking the initiative and doing the job without asking for me to give them a pay or a title change upfront, rather than someone who said, “Well, I’d like to be a tech lead. Make me that and I’ll start doing this job.” There’s a lot of pieces to the job that were subtle and intangible and were mindset shifts, and I think those were the things that when I saw them, even if they weren’t able to delegate out to the team because they weren’t in that position yet, there was a lot of ways they could be doing things to show me that they were serious and ready for that.
[00:59:01.10] My guess is though not all people listening feel like they have the ability to start doing the job they want. Are there tips or things you could recommend, Josh, that would move people in that direction, even if they’re not the manager, even if they’re not the product owner or whatever the new role is that they want to do?
Marcus Blankenship: [00:59:24.10] Yes, definitely. When you’ve done what we described, which is set your target and then identify — if we’re talking in particular about a promotion, then you identified specific responsibilities that the job you’re targeting requires in the job description. You’ll find that those responsibilities that you need to accomplish will usually fall into one of two categories. One of them is the easy stuff, which is the stuff that you can do without any support. For example, you mentioned mentoring somebody or training somebody. You can’t just show up at somebody’s desk and say, “I’m going to mentor you now”, so you would need help on that. But the other things, like be more productive, or manager a bigger portfolio – you can ask, “I’d like to take on this project so that I have a deeper portfolio.” Or you may find that there’s some reporting – the next job up from yours, there’s some monthly reports that that role creates and presents to management; you can start just creating those reports a lot of times with data that you can get from inside the company.
[01:00:31.27] There is the stuff that you can do on your own, and in that case you’ve got a list of things that you need to do; you know the things you could do on your own, so you being executing on those things. “How do I get those things done?” But you also find, as you mentioned, some things that you just can’t do on your own, like mentoring or working with large enterprise clients – you can’t just go grab one of those, you may need it assigned to you, so you have to kind of put your hat in the ring. That’s when you would collaborate with your manager and let your manager know, “Hey, by the way, I’m interested in being promoted to this other job, and I can see what the responsibilities are for that job. I see that it requires me to manage a large enterprise project, so can you help me get assigned to a large enterprise in the next 90 days, or the next one that comes in?” Ask your manager to help give you those things. Or “I see that it requires me to mentor somebody. I know these two junior developers who were just hired, and I’d be happy to mentor them. Can you help me arrange that? Is it okay if you introduce me to those junior developers and I can begin mentoring them to get that under my belt?”
[01:01:30.10] You’ll have to go to your manager and collaborate. The alternative would be, like I said, just dropping by somebody’s desk and saying, “I’m gonna mentor you now because I want to get promoted.” I don’t think that would go over very well. So asking your manager for support is good, because 1) they’ll have a heads up that you’re pursuing a promotion, and that’s good for them to know, and 2) you’ll be asking for their help, listing their help to do those things, so that now you’re collaborating on the things you’re trying to do to get promoted, so now you’re kind of bringing them onto your team and asking for their help, which should be beneficial to you.
Marcus Blankenship: [01:02:00.21] Yes, as I hear that with my manager ears, I cannot imagine telling someone “No, you can’t help mentoring”, “No, you can’t help train”, “No, you can’t work on this kind of project.” You’re not asking me for money, you’re asking me for something that’s entirely within my realm of ability to grant, and you’re showing me that you’re motivated, which is enormously important to me as a manager.
Josh, this has been really interesting. I really appreciate your coming on today. What have I forgotten to ask about negotiation that people need to know?
Josh Doody: [01:02:38.21] That’s a really good question, Marcus. I don’t think you’ve forgotten to ask anything. I talk about this subject a lot, so I can’t think of any topics that we didn’t get to that I think are crucial topics for people. Your questions enabled me to hit on all the good highlights. I don’t think there’s anything that I can think of. We hit all the really good points, and I think everybody listening should now have a good idea of how to negotiate an interview when changing companies, but also how to move up a level in terms of salary or job responsibilities at your current company.
Marcus Blankenship: [01:03:12.27] Great. Josh, where can people find you online? Where can they find your book?
Josh Doody: [01:03:18.14] I’ll start with where you can find me and then give you two places that you can find my book and some stuff that will be really useful to your listeners. You can find me on Twitter, @JoshDoody – pretty easy to find, and I’m pretty active there. I’m also on LinkedIn, so if you look for Josh Doody on LinkedIn, I’m there. My book is at, and I also have a free promotion course for getting promoted at work that walks through that process; it’s an e-mail course, and you can find that at That might be particularly useful… Most people listening to this probably thought “How to interview and how to negotiate was pretty interesting, but I’m not doing that anytime soon”, but most people are probably at work and they’re thinking “I would like to explore how do I move to that next job, how do I get more responsibility?”, so will get you to a free seven-day e-mail course that you can take to walk through the process that I described, with a worksheet and some other good resources, too.
Marcus Blankenship: [01:04:23.10] Josh, thank you so much for being with us today.
Josh Doody: [01:04:26.06] Thanks for having me, Marcus. It was a lot of fun!

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