Negotiating salary

Dear Bob…

After several relatively short and not-very-well-paying consulting gigs, I’m being offered a full-time position tomorrow morning with the firm that I’ve been consulting with for about seven weeks now. The only thing I’m dreading about this is salary negotiation, which I’ve never been good at. If you have any advice, I’d be all ears.

Apropos of nothing at all, by the way, I know you’ve been advising people on employment issues for quite a long time. Do you happen to have any idea roughly what percentage of the work force is W-2 employees vis a vis people who are self-employed? Particularly in IT? Having tried to make a go at it on my own as a contractor, I know what the challenges involved are, and it seems to me that it’s a lot tougher than being a W-2 employee in most ways, so I’ve often wondered how many people do it on their own rather than being corporate employees.

– Becoming W2

Dear W2 …

I’m not all that good at salary negotiations either, sad to say. My best advice: Go onto www.salary.com and find some titles more or less equivalent to the position you’ll be going into. That will at least give you a rough idea of the asking price, which in turn will tell you if their offer is reasonable.

If they haven’t already, they’ll probably ask you your salary history. You can either (a) answer the question; or (b) smile, and say something like, “Something I learned a long time ago is that whoever says the first number loses the negotiation. So tell me what you have in mind for the salary first. Then I’ll by happy to give you my salary history.”

To answer your second question, I’ve never seen any statistics on that subject. It’s an interesting question, though. Does anyone reading this know the answer?

– Bob