Recently my friend Sasha said something really smart:
"Everyone treats counteroffers like a magic wand that changes everything. Whether a company gives you an offer depends on three things:
- Your value to the company (how much money you can make them)
- Your cost to the company (what you’re trying to raise with a counteroffer)
- And the company’s belief about how likely you are to reject the proposed compensation.
A counteroffer only sometimes affects the last point.”
I completely agree with Sasha’s idea and want to take it a bit further: your goal in negotiations is to make yourself un-bendable. A counteroffer seems like a good way to show Facebet: “if you don’t agree to pay me 100,500 monies, look — Ohio SunOil is offering 100,501!”
But if nobody is giving you such a perfect counteroffer, you can build other signals around yourself that say “don’t underpay this person”:
- A financial safety cushion. Easy: if you can afford to look for a job for another six months, your ability to reject things is higher than that of someone who’s already drowning in red numbers. By the way, in terms of the “secretary problem,” maybe you should reject the first offer! 🌚 I myself never did that, of course — I don’t love math that much and I haven’t reached that level of enlightenment yet.
- A strong network. Same logic — your chances of finding a job increase.
- Still, your value to companies. If you bring a lot of value to one company, chances are you can bring it to another as well.
I’m not a big fan of long lists, so three points is enough. I think the general rule is this: invest not in having two or three simultaneous offers, but in the skills and stability that let you come to negotiations not as a hostage. Nobody negotiates with hostages, and frankly, you shouldn’t go to a negotiation with terrorists in the role of a hostage to begin with.