If you’ve gotten at least one offer, now is the time to think about negotiating your way to the higher compensation you know you deserve!  Job offer negotiation is tough for a lot of college students new to the game of how to find a job. College internships are even tougher to negotiate as they are tougher to come by.

But now, you have hopefully read my article on How to assess the value of your offers, where I describe the various sources of value that you should look for in an offer.  The first step in negotiating is to first know what the company is really offering and then looking for ways to leverage that against another offer.

Looking at your list of values for two different companies, first compare line by line, such as base salary versus base salary.  This comparison is natural, and you find easy leverage when one offer is greater than another.  In this case, just ask company A to match (or beat) the salary offer from company B.

But what happens when you really want to work for company B, and their compensation package is higher overall?  Do you really want to just accept the highest offer?  In some cases, if it truly meets all your needs and expectations, this may be the right answer. 

In other cases though, it may not be.  Even though company B’s offer is higher; the “real” value is not.  How could that be, you ask?  Cost of living!

On the other hand, even if this isn’t the issue, it can never hurt to try to negotiate.  For me, when I know I can ask for (and get) a higher offer, I go for it!  What is the worst that will happen…  The company tells you no?  Big loss, you stay where you started (with a pretty decent offer).  The company withdraws an offer?  No way!  They will never withdraw an offer just because you tried to negotiate with them!  There is really no downside to trying to negotiate if you do it right.

So how do you do it?  Well, I did it this way:
Company A offered me $67,500 with a $5,000 signing bonus.  Total compensation potential: $72,500.
Company B offered me $61,300 with a $3,000 signing bonus, and a potential 12% performance bonus.  Total compensation potential: $71,656.

Pretty even you would think, right?  Well, the issue here is that Company A was located in Los Angeles, whereas Company B was in a much cheaper part of the country to live in.  So really, company A needed to raise their compensation package significantly in order to be truly competitive with Company B.  I explained to them exactly that on the phone, and I was able to negotiate Company A to an annual salary of $70,000!

Their offer was higher, they knew it, yet they still offered me more.  What was my leverage?  Cost of living.

Here are some other sources of leverage you can use:

Bottom line?  You always have some form of leverage, you just need to find it, and apply it.

Keep in mind that you must always try to keep your negotiations in a collaborative space, never adversarial.  What I mean is that the attitude you have with the company must be “I intend to provide excellent value to your company, and will be well worth every penny I am paid.  At the same time, I want to make sure that I am fairly compensated for that value.  I want to work with you to come to an agreement that meets both of our interests.”

Approaching negotiations with this attitude will yield far better results than an attitude such as “I am worth this, you need to give it to me or else I will go elsewhere.”

I truly hope this article has been helpful in providing the basic building blocks for your job search. From here, feel free to explore the other articles on the website to get more in depth information, or purchase our complete Job Search Guide!

Happy (Job) Hunting!

Thanks again for your interest in College-Career-Builder.com


E-Mail: coachbob@college-career-builder.com