A People Pleaser's Guide to Salary Negotiation

RubyConf AU 2023

by Colleen Lavin

In this engaging talk titled "A People Pleaser's Guide to Salary Negotiation" presented at RubyConf AU 2023, Colleen Lavin addresses the challenges that individuals, particularly people pleasers, face during salary negotiations. Colleen, sharing her own experiences, emphasizes that many people, especially those who have a tendency to seek approval from others, often struggle to negotiate their salaries effectively. She highlights significant statistics revealing that a large percentage of people accept job offers without any negotiation, leading to potential losses in earnings.

Key Points Discussed:
- Understanding People-Pleasing and Negotiation: Colleen reflects on her experience as a self-identified people pleaser and the realization that this trait can hinder effective salary negotiation.
- The Importance of Negotiation: She cites studies showing that while 57.4% of individuals accept job offers without negotiation, 64% of employers expect candidates to negotiate, emphasizing the missed opportunities for many.
- Gender Disparities: Colleen discusses how people-pleasing traits disproportionately affect women, contributing to the gender pay gap. She shares statistics indicating that fewer women negotiate salaries compared to men, which can lead to lower offers.
- Effective Negotiation Tactics: Colleen introduces practical strategies for negotiating salaries without compromising one’s personality or being overly aggressive. These tactics include researching salary benchmarks, determining non-negotiables, and projecting confidence.
- Motivational Techniques: She suggests using personal rewards and visualization to bolster confidence before negotiations, as well as the utility of having scripted responses during discussions.
- Final Thoughts on Capitalism: Colleen points out that the issue of salary negotiation is compounded by systemic injustices in capitalism, urging attendees to recognize their worth and to not shy away from asking for compensation that aligns with their skills and experiences.

Main Takeaways:
- Embracing negotiation is crucial for anyone looking to maximize their salary.
- It’s essential to prepare thoroughly and to approach negotiations with a mindset that balances being true to oneself while asserting one’s worth.
- Recognizing societal biases and working to counteract them can help individuals progress in their careers and achieve better financial outcomes.

00:00:03.380 Jumping to it. All right, and we're ready to go. Okay, so we're not going to have slides for a little bit, but I believe in you. You can use your imaginations. Just pretend that I have the best slides in the world behind me.

00:00:11.880 All right, we've got yes! Oh, I like the attitude in here! You must have remembered that we're closer to lunch. Great! Hi, I'm Colleen, and I'm sure at one point during the information improv, they've told you what the talk was about. We're doing a people pleaser's guide to salary negotiation.

00:00:31.380 So what does that mean? Why am I giving it? What are we all doing here? I am not an expert at negotiation, but I used to really, really suck at it. Like, I was just terrible. I am a people pleaser. I come from a long line of people pleasers.

00:00:48.000 I’m from the American Midwest; I think that contributes to it. But when I first started out in tech, I did not understand why people really wanted to hire me. I was like, 'Oh, they're going to give me money? That's a bad decision, but okay.' Before I took my first real tech job, where I got actual money, I asked my mom for advice.

00:01:11.880 Who you may remember is a people pleaser. Actually, she’s a worse one than I am. So, I asked my mom, and this picture of me with my dog by the way, is here so you all like me more. Yay, people pleasing! I asked my mom for advice, and she gave me the worst salary negotiation advice that anyone in the entire world has ever received.

00:01:38.520 Would anyone like to guess what that is? Anyway, I will pick randomly. Just take it. Somehow, even worse than that: her advice was to just tell the hiring manager that you trust them and are sure that they'll give you a fair wage. Please, for the love of God, be smarter than I was and do not ever say that! But unfortunately, I had like one brain cell in my head that day, and so when I was negotiating, I said that verbatim.

00:02:28.140 Later, I found out that my colleagues with the same or less experience started anywhere from five to twenty thousand more than me. Yeah, do not listen to my mom for salary advice! It would be really weird if any of you knew her. But since learning to properly negotiate, I've increased my salary by 85 percent in the last two years. Now, some of that's experience, but some of it is actually being confident and saying no to insulting offers.

00:03:05.340 It’s really scary, but I've gotten raises of 30 percent while not being a jerk and also following standard negotiation advice that I feel is written for heartless people who don’t care what anyone in the entire world thinks of them, which is a great trait. I wish I had it. So, who here actually identifies as a people pleaser? Anyone? Oh, I see a lot of hands. Wonderful! It’s terrible actually, I hope we all kind of grow past this.

00:03:43.560 It's a flaw. It’s probably not the best — not the worst, I guess. It's better than being one of those people who just say, 'I'm just being honest; this is my opinion, and I must share it with everyone at all times.' There are no actual studies that I could find about the correlation between being a people pleaser and being terrible at salary negotiations or just not doing it. But I’m going to ask you another question: who in this room negotiated their salary for the job they are currently in? Show of hands! I'm noticing that all the areas that had the people pleasers don’t have as many hands up. Science!

00:05:01.320 So why does this actually matter and why am I giving this talk? Great question. Thank you, me for asking it. So, 57.4 percent of people accepted their current job without negotiating. By the way, these are Australian statistics. Americans are slightly more prone to negotiating, but 57.4 percent of people accepted their current job with no negotiation. And why does that actually matter?

00:05:43.220 Because 64 percent of employers expect you to negotiate. And if you do negotiate, 85 percent of people who try get something of what they ask for. Maybe not all of it; probably very rarely all of it. But never give them the actual number that you want. Give them a number that’s like 10K higher, and you’ll at least get something if you're part of the 85 percent. If you’re part of the 15 percent who don’t, maybe it's time to look for someone else.

00:06:03.000 Full disclosure, I did write this talk before all of the mass tech layoffs, so there was a little more leverage there. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t negotiate; it just means that it might be a little trickier now. So, what does this reluctance to negotiate mean? And who is actually impacted by this? You're all smart people, so I think you can probably guess that a lot of people pleasers—specifically, 30 percent more women—say that they’re people pleasers compared to men.

00:06:51.600 And I will say for these statistics they are men and women. I could not find any studies that actually included non-binary people; I’m sorry. But here’s the data we’ve got. So 30 percent more women are self-described people pleasers. And 51.3 percent of men negotiated salary for their current job. Conversely, the people pleasing women only 35.8 percent negotiated. This might partially explain the gender pay gap, which compared to median weekly earnings of white men working full-time, Hispanic women’s full-time earnings in 2021 were just 58.4 percent, Black women 61 percent, and white women’s 79.6 percent, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research.

00:08:03.060 And it’s not just that women aren't doing it; it’s that 60 percent of job offers extended to men are greater than those of the same level extended to women. Which, looking at the number, is greater than the amount of men who are negotiating. So it's not just that women need to lean in and be a girl boss — dear God, no! It's a system that’s not necessarily stacked against everyone who’s not a white man.

00:09:01.140 I used to, when I first started telling myself that I needed to negotiate, look at all of the traditional advice like ‘project confidence’, ‘don't be afraid to be a jerk’, and ‘never say please’ — which was actually in one of them, which I think my heart would die a little bit. I cannot imagine that! I read another, by the way, which was ‘don't say thank you; you deserve it’, which I feel like, again, was written for heartless robots. And I like robots.

00:10:02.520 Many things are tailored towards white men. I used to kind of try to do this. I had a saying, I don’t know how many of you have watched '30 Rock', but I would always say 'What would Jack Donaghey do?' But there’s a problem there. The problem is if you are not a white man negotiating, using these tactics backfires tremendously because you’re held to a different standard.

00:10:40.980 If you are a woman or an underrepresented minority, you're considered pushy, aggressive, needy — should we even hire them in the first place? You’re considered like you’re asking too much for asking the same thing. And it sucks. So I had to move on and find something. Because even if you tried internally for those people who ask for raises, 300 percent more are approved for men versus women. Still not like a really high number, but it’s still three times as much for men.

00:11:10.500 We talked about this a little bit, implicit bias and explicit bias, they are here. There’s a lot of research that proves it, and we’re not going to fix inequality with a conference talk and a can-do attitude. Any of you who thought we were going to live in your little bubble — that sounds wonderful! Men are offered higher salaries than women, and white men are offered higher salaries than anyone else for the same job. It usually happens before negotiation.

00:11:47.640 This is unfair. What we can do is try our hardest to get the wages that our peers are getting. We can actually try again, leaning in is good, but sometimes you’ve got to do a little bit of that. You have to put forth the effort and at least try to negotiate. So find the process that you're most comfortable with, and all that matters is that it actually works for you.

00:12:38.520 With that said, I have a strategy. This is a series of tactics, many of which are really silly, but actually helped me do this and have been effective for me. Some of them are ridiculous; they won't work for you. This is not a prescriptive, one-sized-fits-all strategy. Pick and choose! If you're interested in one of them, try it out.

00:13:05.400 Oh yeah, before we go there, we’ve got to remember one thing: the villain in the story is capitalism! One of my favorite podcasts by the way has a saying: 'It was capitalism all along.' This is really true in everyday life. And what this means here is it kind of comes down to class background as well.

00:13:27.720 People coming from poorer backgrounds into tech often are just thrilled to get money because it's more than their whole household has seen. In my situation, a lot of my friends are teachers or social workers and they are horribly underpaid. So, asking for a number that when I'm offered a salary that is already two to three times what they make and I send it back and say 'No, that’s not enough for me' feels like a horrible thing.

00:14:01.380 It’s so hard in your head to reconcile the fact that getting paid more than people who honestly do way more for society than me isn’t actually a problem with me but rather with the system. Accepting less money just because you feel bad that they have it really lets capitalism win. Never let capitalism win!

00:14:17.520 Also, I have a bullet point that just says: salary does not determine human worth. If any of you need that, that bullet point is really sad. All right, so on to the actual tactics after we’ve gone on our capitalism rant.

00:14:43.440 Tactic zero (because you people here start counting floors as zero or G, but I wasn’t going to do a tactic G, that’s silly): Remember that the goal of your negotiation is not to have a new best friend. Be nice, be yourself. If you decide to take the job, you can become best friends with this person later. This is not the time. This is the time to ask for what you want.

00:15:37.320 Be as nice as you want to be, but realize that niceness is not what is most necessary in this situation. Now, tactic one: research heavily! Determine your non-negotiables. Find every single piece of data that you can about the position you're going for: the salary usually given, the salary given to past people who’ve had it, levels.fyi; a lot of these are really useful.

00:16:00.660 One thing I’ve actually found useful, if you really want to be a little creepy, is finding a person who used to have this job at this company on LinkedIn and asking them if they have some dirt to share. It works! It's wonderful, especially if they're a little annoyed. Beautiful times.

00:16:47.940 Determine your goals; but it shouldn’t just be salary. There are other things that you can negotiate besides salary. You can negotiate to be fully remote. You can negotiate vacation days. You can negotiate to have a vacation that starts as soon as you sign on, but doesn’t actually take away from your PTO.

00:17:44.160 Or you can negotiate a sign-on bonus. I once got like five thousand dollars just by saying, 'Hey, can I have ten thousand dollars for signing this piece of paper?' They gave it to me! I thought they’d say zero. I have never made that much money for that short of a sentence. It’s ridiculous!

00:18:29.480 But have this written down for yourself. Have it in front of you while you’re interviewing and be prepared to walk if they do not meet what you have determined to be your worth. Also, talk salary during your first contact with an actual human. But oh, don’t be the one to actually say the number first.

00:19:32.520 If you’re talking to a person, first time, recruiter call at the end, they’re usually going to ask you what your number is. Get their number! Find out what band they have. I’ll have a script for this later, but I feel it’s relevant here too.

00:20:50.760 Tactic two: find motivation. So, I am a complete tiny little baby when it comes to things that intimidate me. When I have to do something scary, like negotiate— you know, have a conversation where you ask for something— I make myself a little prize scheme.

00:22:14.040 I’m apparently as bribable as a five-year-old. If I can get the offer up by ten thousand dollars, then I get a fancy latte from my favorite coffee shop. If I negotiate a sign-on bonus, I treat myself to a croissant. If I get extra vacation days, guess who gets to watch their favorite movie tonight? Me! It’s stupid, it’s silly, but it works really well.

00:24:20.480 Another tactic is to pretend or to make up an imaginary enemy and pretend that they're trying to go up against you with a higher offer. This could be anyone; this could be real or fake. My person is this guy at a hackathon once who dismissed my suggestion by telling me to be more ladylike.

00:25:04.440 Yes, I’m kind of glad he did because there are so many accomplishments in my life directly related to spiteing him in my imagination. Oh, he doesn’t know this, but I’ve beaten him at twelve hackathons since then.

00:25:54.080 The last one for motivation is: if there’s something that you’re holding back from because of your salary or something else, look at pictures of it! When I was looking for my current job, I really wanted a dog.

00:26:59.520 But dogs are little money-eating machines! Oh my gosh! From the vet to everything—she was a rescue, but still! So what I did was have pictures of really cute dogs on my computer screen during negotiations. I kind of recommend it! Even if you don’t want a dog, it’s really relaxing. I said that this wouldn’t work for everyone, but it worked for me! Here’s the dog, by the way!

00:28:21.360 I did get the job. I did get the dog! And tactic three: this is important enough to get its own slide. Project false confidence. For this, which will probably only take you a total of 15 to 20 minutes, everything combined—but by the way, this is less time than an episode of a sitcom—for this time you have to pretend that you completely deserve it.

00:29:02.059 Believe in your self-worth, whether you actually do or not. For this amount of time, the number you are asking for and the things you are asking for are things that are fair. They're things that you deserve. I don’t have great advice for actually getting this confidence because my own tactics are even more ridiculous than the dog picture ones.

00:29:51.300 When I started really negotiating, I tried the Jack Donaghey thing and that didn’t feel right, so now I listen to my favorite song from 'Legally Blonde: The Musical.' It’s called 'Chip on Your Shoulder'; it’s great. Highly recommend, it’s like six minutes and 35 seconds long — the perfect amount of time pre-interview! If I really need stuff, I watch my favorite episode of ‘Parks and Rec.’ I’m like Leslie Knope; she did it with the flu; I can do this without the flu.

00:30:45.600 You don’t have to lie; you just have to make believe. You could pretend to be a different person with the same name, background, resume, and different levels of confidence. Maybe they also like have a pony or something, that’d be cool.

00:31:35.280 All right! Tactic four: write a script! Show of hands: who in this room had a job interview that was completely remote? Yeah, it’s a majority by a long shot. This is the best if you are terrible at negotiation because you just have to have a Google Doc open with everything you need to say. That’s all you need.

00:32:07.320 When they ask you a question that is scary when it comes to negotiation, they don’t need to know that you’re reading your answer from a script. Write down all of the scenarios that scare you, keep them in a document, and keep this open.

00:32:56.800 Never state your desired salary first! This is a piece of advice that all of us have probably heard and many of us have broken. It really is useful! If you get asked about anything related to salary, no number! You say the salary I’m looking for is highly dependent on the role, the team, and the whole package.

00:35:01.440 If you could please share the range that you have in mind and more about the benefits package, then I can tell you if that’s something I'm looking for or not. You don’t have to use a phone voice, but somehow I always do! I have never had a person respond to that by saying no. They have a range.

00:37:05.240 In the U.S., I don’t actually know if this is true for Australia, but a lot of states in the U.S. are now passing laws where you have to have the range in the listing, but a lot of companies are getting around that by posting things like zero to three hundred thousand, which is very helpful at showing you where you do not want to work.

00:38:39.540 Now, if you’ve just received your first offer, never accept the first offer! Even if it's more money than you think any person should be legally allowed to make — don’t accept it! Ask for a little more: greed is good in this situation. If you feel bad about it, increase your donations on a recurring basis, like the talk yesterday.

00:39:32.420 You received it; you want more. Thank you so much! I’m really happy to get this offer. I loved interviewing and really enjoyed all the people that I met — which is usually true, honestly, if I'm seriously considering a company. However, with my background and experience, this isn't really what I had in mind; I was hoping for something closer to this number. Is there anything that we can do to make this offer a little closer to my expectations?

00:40:36.360 Usually, they’ll either immediately counter (super rare) or say, ‘Let me get back to you on that,’ which is when we move to my final tactic. Try to keep everything you possibly can in email. If you’re anything like me, your stupid little lizard brain is going to betray you in the moment.

00:41:46.020 You can think about answers before sending an email. You’re not going to betray yourself with that! So, my trick for this is to just pretend that I’m the busiest person on the planet and I don’t actually have five minutes right now, but can we just do this over email? Just reiterate your counter offer right after the initial offer.

00:43:05.360 Then when they ask to talk, keep it in the email thread. I don’t know if this actually helped anyone, but it really works for me. I hope it works for some of you. Thank you for sticking through all of the tech issues!

00:44:08.160 If you want real resources, here’s a bunch here. I’ll post this in the Slack as well. Thank you!

RubyConf AU 2023