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Negotiating Salary/Vacation Days
Zek
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I have a job offer for a web development gig and am trying to work out a strategy to negotiate. I've never had to negotiate before since I took my last job out of college at face value, so I have no idea what I'm doing. The company and work seem like a big improvement - I'm pretty fed up with my current job. It's also a fairly big relocation but that's honestly a plus, I really want a change of scenery. I got the offer via email today and here's the situation:
1. The salary is respectable - a bit lower than what I'm making now but with considerably lower cost of living(moving away from the vicinity of NYC). According to most cost of living calculators it's about a 10% effective boost.
2. Vacation is one week per year, with unlimited sickdays. I've heard hours are fully flexible and you can work from home so you can probably rearrange your time make up days, but that still sounds pretty crappy.
From reading reviews about the company on Glassdoor the common consensus is that both salary and vacation are easily negotiable. I would take the job for the salary though I wouldn't complain if it were higher, but I really want to negotiate up the vacation days to a respectable level. Anybody have any tips on how to approach this? How should I phrase the response to the email, and what's a good strategy for making a counteroffer? Any risks to keep in mind, etc?
1. The salary is respectable - a bit lower than what I'm making now but with considerably lower cost of living(moving away from the vicinity of NYC). According to most cost of living calculators it's about a 10% effective boost.
2. Vacation is one week per year, with unlimited sickdays. I've heard hours are fully flexible and you can work from home so you can probably rearrange your time make up days, but that still sounds pretty crappy.
From reading reviews about the company on Glassdoor the common consensus is that both salary and vacation are easily negotiable. I would take the job for the salary though I wouldn't complain if it were higher, but I really want to negotiate up the vacation days to a respectable level. Anybody have any tips on how to approach this? How should I phrase the response to the email, and what's a good strategy for making a counteroffer? Any risks to keep in mind, etc?
Zek on
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Find out about personal days and holidays. If they give you paid holidays and paid personal days (2-3 personal days per year seems fair to me) the 7 days of vacation may not be so bad if you have the ability to arrange your own schedule. Personally I've never had a job (no college mind you) where starting out you got fewer than 12 vacation days per year, so I would certainly try and and negotiate that 7 upwards.
My biggest concern in this economy would be health, vision, dental and short/long term disability they offer.
I've never had an offer come by email and would personally just dismiss it, it sounds rather mickey mouse that they wouldn't give you a phone call.
The biggest risk is they may not negotiate and may hate it. That said:
First thank them, then explain that you have a counter-proposal, and then WHY you should get it. Don't sound like "I get this cuz I deserve it" obviously, but sell yourself and why YOU are worth 10-14 vacation days in addition to the previous offer or whatever you're going to try to do. The other option is ask that you get a 6-month review with those vacation days as something that would be given to you if you're excelling in your position. Good luck!
TylerJ on League of Legends (it's free and fun!)
With my current job I get 17 PTOs which includes everything, many of which I use in half days for appointments and the like since the schedule isn't flexible. So if I could bump it up to 2 weeks vacation here that would probably be comparable enough, though neither of them are great.
It also may be they don't care how often you're sick as long as you get your work done. Which can be a scary thing on it's own.
This generally means that he gets one week of paid vacation per year, and can take sick days as needed. That means sick days are not accrued or tracked formally in any way.
If you abuse that, it will be obvious and you'll get reprimanded for it.
Saying like "One week a year, for the first 3 years and one day every 2 years after that" will get you better results too, and also for the unlimited sick days say "I'd like sick days to be untracked because the last thing we should have is a company that loses money because someone comes in with the flu and gets everyone else sick because they can't take a 3-4 days off without getting the 3rd degree. Losing one person for 5 days is better than losing 85% of the office for 1 day."
I've had mild success with that one. I've had more success with setting up a telecommute program with flex time for people who are sick. If you're unable to make it, and can work from home (something like you have the shits) then great, do that. But if you can't (flu, migraine, etc), and you're out of sick time, then flex time lets you work N hours a day to make the time up.
None of the salary positions I've had have had unlimited sick days. Hourly? Yes, well, you don't get paid if you're out of days. Technically I probably wouldn't get paid with salary either.
In my experience* salary is a range and there is some flexibility with the hiring manager, but vacation policy is written in stone by HR. Hell, the new employee packets contain print ups of the accrual schedule.
*YMMV
I would use this as your angle of attack. It's one thing to just ask for more vacation because you really want it, but if you explain that for the past X years your current employer has given you Y days, I think it's fairly common for companies to try and at least match what you had at your previous company.
It gets a little sticky since the two companies count days differently, but trying for 2 weeks seems very doable. (If I were you I'd mention the 17 PTOs and conveniently forget to say that the 17 days includes sick days.)
Keep in mind a some states require that you be given reasonable time off to make appointments that doesn't count against your PTO or sick days, provided sufficient notice. @Zek you may want to look into that.