Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

Like many others in the comments, I disagree with the whole "Don't be the first to state a number" strategy. Being weaselly about your number is a very noob thing to do in a negotiation. A skilled negotiator will seize on this and anchor the negotiations in at a very low rate. You need to know your number ahead of time, and drop it on them like it's the most natural thing in the world. Your initial offer should be…

> We’ve been talking about your employer as an abstraction, but in the instant case you’re talking to an actual person. Let’s call him Bob. It is Bob’s job to get you signed with the company as cheaply as possible, but Bob is not super motivated to do so, because Bob is not spending Bob’s money to hire you. Bob is spending Bob’s budget. Bob generally does not get large performance incentives for shaving money off of his hiring budget…

Just to add an important caveat to the promise of the headline. When you reach a certain point, earning more money usually comes with increasing downsides. Managers at most well-run, larger companies will expect more than just your reasonable best efforts. As you move up the ladder they will demand consistent delivery of specific, tangible results. Sometimes you'll be required to achieve these results with insufficient resources or in changing circumstances beyond your control. And each year the targets will…

A brilliant quote from a Harvard Law School Negotiation Paper on the same topic: "Instead, try to fgure out what pay category someone with your education and experience would receive, then build a case for a salary at the high end of that range. If an interviewer asks you to name your price, how should you respond? In their book 3-D Negotiation (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), Lax and James Sebenius recommend making a “non-ofer ofer,” or a statement that…