They can also pay less than their competitors. A lifetime ago, in a different career, I worked for a big pharma company that paid about 20% less than their main competitors and about 15% less than biotech startups. Their argument was that they didn't want their current employees to fall behind new/outside hires. Needless to say, most people stayed there until they got a promotion and moved on elsewhere or went back to school/med school. Obviously you had a few lifers but they were happy with that cadence.
I'm leaving a company that does this, so I fully get it!
I'm mainly confused why a company would tell someone who turned down a job offer (they had my range the entire time, which I re-iterated in every interview) that they lowballed them because of internal equity but would like to talk to them again.
1) Why should any prospective employee care about their internal equity when other companies can and do offer full market value?
2) Why would a prospective employee want a job at a company that lowballs them by THAT much, especially when that prospective employee was honest out of the gate that offers were coming from elsewhere. It's a baffling move that makes me never want to work for them because if they lowball on the initial offer, why would they ever treat you properly once you are internal.
I'm just baffled by the entire experience.
Joining this thread as I'm now experiencing the job market we're in.
First off, apologies for those who have been unemployed and can't find work. It's disheartening that so many of you folks are getting ghosted or getting the runaround from potential employers exploiting the market. In less desperate times, those are the companies we would choose not to work for, for the way they appear to treat people; but nonetheless we need to earn a living and pay bills.
My situation is a bit different than many posting here as I'm job searching while currently gainfully employed and a high-performer at my current organization, but regardless I'm experiencing the pains of this job market. I'm an experienced IT leader and Agile practitioner (10+ years) and have demonstrated a clear career direction and progression. I'm looking for a culture change from my current organization because it has not, and seems will not, make the necessary changes to properly transform its way of working, something which I was hired to participate in.
Recently I applied to six jobs, of which at a minimum clearly met their requirements, or at best did so in the same industry I've been working in for the past six years. One of which was a title promotion (it's all the things I do now but my current org does not recognize my role as something worthy of that title). Two of which were internal referrals. One of those internal referrals they are still actively recruiting for but never notified me I was passed for consideration; the rest including the other internal referral I was rejected without even a screening interview.
Never in all of my career have I experienced this. Before I'd at least get an initial screening at the least, especially for the internal referrals. It's weird to see so many different experiences in this thread - either people are swatting away job offers like flies or can't get a single interview. Now to be fair, I've had to turn down many contract positions (from legit vendors, not the offshore data farmers who screengrab, match keywords and coldcall), because my situation is not one that I would want to move from full-time to contract at this time. If I did lose my job I feel fairly confident I'd be able to land a contract role quickly based on what I've seen.
So I wonder what gives with this market - is it largely geographical why people are seeing the most success?
I have some general advice for anyone looking for a job that has done me well over the years, and here it is written below in case it might help you or anyone else:
I'll break down my strategy by parts since I may have gone overboard, but this worked for me the last two times I looked for a job - I found a job in about a month.
Part 1:
So before even job hunting, do yourself a favour and do market research about your position and any other positions you might be interested in. Going into interviews and saying "Well the Canadian market value of this position is about $90,000 - $95,000, where does your company fall in comparison to that?" is a great way of turning the salary expectation question on its head and putting the company on the backfoot of needing to justify why their rates are lower than market value, at market value or are higher.
For my job, I did this by averaging salaries at 10 companies in my sector within my province + 10 companies within my section in the country using Glassdoor. From there I made an average of the low-end salary and high-end salary for the position and determined that I'd be best placed if I was slightly below market average: in this case about $90k.
I also did similar calculations by looking at average salaries for my role on Neuvoo, Glassdoor (local), Payscale and Glassdoor (country wide) which gave me a lot of solid research on average salaries, etc.
This allowed me to go into interviews and use the line I mentioned above and it never took me out of contention for any role I did not want to be in contention for.
Part 2:
Update your LinkedIn with outcomes of your work, i.e. if you worked on a product that accounted for over $10 million in sales in 2020, mention that if you can and your role in making that product successful! Do that kind of analysis for your LinkedIn as a whole, not just showing your skills but how your skills transferred into measurable results.
Part 3:
Open your LinkedIn to recruiters and see what comes in over the next few weeks.
Part 4:
If you had stuff come in, follow up on what is interesting and abandon what is not. In this latest go-round, over 15 companies reached out to me via a recruiter, and I engaged with the ones that seemed really interesting. While this was happening, I was applying to maybe 2-3 jobs a week, things that were a little more outside the box but would have been an amazing opportunity.
If you are not getting offers through recruiters that you'd like and would like to apply to a bunch of jobs yourself:
Be mindful that job hunting is a numbers game in many ways. What's worked for me (twice now) is getting a free monthly trial of LinkedIn Premium and really hitting the ground running on looking at and applying to companies it thinks I'd be a good match for, if they were interesting. It's worked for me in the realm of marketing, no idea how well it'll work for others.
Helpful General Rules for Hunting:
- Always, Always, Always save the job posting as a PDF. Nothing worse than a company getting back to you and the position is erased from the internet.
- Make an excel file for your first interview that has general company info, who you are talking to, salary expectations, questions for them, company values, etc. Doesn't have to be lengthy, you just don't want to go scrambling for this info if they bring it up on the call.
- I also like to make a sheet prior to my first call that is the posting line by line with how my skills apply to that line item line by line. It works for me.
- As I move forward in the interview process, I make a new sheet with the next interviewer(s), any interesting comments, salary conversations, etc. Keeps everything in one centralized place.
I found that doing all of the above put me in a great mental space for each interview and gave me notes to reference, confidence in what I was talking about, etc.
My other biggest piece of advice is trust your gut if something feels wrong. I told two companies I no longer wanted to be in contention because the interviews and companies as a whole just felt off. I'm glad I did that in retrospect, since taking those two out of my interview rotation allowed be to really double down and focus on the other two, which led me to offers from both companies.
Any company that isn't getting back to you isn't respecting your time, move on to the next one.
