Tips For Entrepreneurs - Lance Winsaft

Consultants are expensive. When you contract a consultant, you are paying for expertise that you do not have.
This can be very valuable. Indeed, I have benefited greatly from “selling” my knowledge to those that do not know what I know. And I have earned every bit of financial reward gained through helping others where they lacked information necessary to succeed in one area or another.
Looking to experts for knowledge is very helpful, especially when you are an entrepreneur interested in success.
One might say that it is impossible to know everything that one needs to know in order to run a successful business, whatever size it may be. And this would be true. Except when it’s not.
Sometimes we look to experts because we lack confidence in ourselves or because we do not believe that we know the answers to the questions we seek. At times we may even know what we need to know but we lack the courage to execute. In these instances we are paying a price for ignoring that we actually know more than we think we do.
Or, that we are capable of achieving great things through sheer perseverance alone, for example.
No matter how technical, no matter how complicated a problem, what if you could tap into a universal source of information that would allow you to connect with what you need in order to thrive in your business?
Maybe we can’t download information about how to fly a helicopter the way the character Trinity in the movie The Matrix does, but I believe we all have access to an infinite amount of knowledge that is stored in the universal memory banks. This information is accessible through our intention.
The human mind is an incredible machine capable of receiving and already possessing much more information than we can ever imagine.
Science is teaching us through quantum physics that all knowledge is stored within the very DNA housed in our cells. By activating our so-called “Junk DNA,” we are able to discover the unlimited potential we have within us to create and manipulate the universe.
We have only to set aside our limiting beliefs, step into our full power and trust in the capacity we have to move through every opportunity with wisdom and grace. For entrepreneurs, there is no greater challenge than to understand the seemingly complex nature of the structure of a business.

Key questions we face as small business owners:

-What makes a business succeed?
-How can technology be used to empower the very structure of our business?
-How can we wisely utilize human capital to support our profitability?
-What are the financial models that work for us? How can we establish credibility for our brand?
-What limits us in causing our business to succeed at the level of our wildest dreams?
These are all questions we face daily as business owners.

You got this!

Most of us do not believe we can answer these questions on our own. And often when we try, we fail. Fear gets in the way, belief systems we acquire in our childhood, such as “I am not good enough” or “there must be something wrong with me,” stand in the way of our success.
If we can put aside these limiting patterns in our behavior and in our mindset, we will begin to utilize the Inner Knowing that we have come here with and that we have acquired through the evolutionary process of our species. First, we must believe in ourselves and then we must trust that we CAN have this access!
Everyone has experienced what is called an “aha moment.”
These moments of enlightened truth come to us from the very source of Inner Knowing that I am referring to. Usually these aha moments occur randomly in our lives.
And when they do we are often astonished and amazed at the truth and wisdom within them. How can we cause aha moments to come to us at will?
How can we conspire with the source of Inner Knowing to bring truth and wisdom to our experience whenever we choose?

FIVE BEST EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS - Lance Winsaft

Today’s blog is specific interview questions to ask when hiring for an executive level role. Executive level roles can be defined loosely in different ways, but typically, we like to think of an executive level role as a vice president or above. Depending on the structure of your company, though, this could be a director level or above, again depending on the size and structure of your company.

CHALLENGES WITH HIRING EXECUTIVES

The point is, you should know if you’re hiring for an executive position or not. Hiring for executives can come with its own set of challenges. Executive roles tend to have very common threads with the things that are important about them. Typically an executive level role has a leadership or management responsibility, and this is something that’s important to be able to interview for. An executive level role also will tend to have responsibility over strategy, and oftentimes financials, as well, and will also typically be involved with making high-level decisions that have major business consequences.

NO PARTICULAR ORDER

The following questions are not in any sort of specific order, as the order of importance could depend on what’s more important for you with this particular role. Positions are extremely custom, depending on the company. So there’s no such thing as the five best questions for executives across the board.

QUESTION #1 – OVERCOMING CHALLENGES

One question that is certainly important is to ask the candidate about challenges they’ve had in the past and how they overcame them. You want to ask the question just like that. You want to say, “Tell me about some challenges or difficulties you’ve had in your previous positions, and then tell me how you overcame those.” Asking an open-ended question like this will give you a lot of insight, depending on how the candidate answers. The candidate will be giving you insight into what they consider challenges, first and foremost. Secondly, you’ll get to see how they think and how their brain works when it comes to overcoming those challenges. This is very important when it comes to hiring somebody at an executive level.

QUESTION #2 – DAY TO DAY RESPONSIBILITIES

Another really important question to ask is to have the executive walk you through their day-to-day responsibilities over a particular period of time. You might want to ask about previous roles or just their most recent role, whatever you feel is relevant. The point is that this is going to give you insight into what their day-to-day looks like and what they have been and are responsible for and what they have a track record doing. This is extremely important because you need to be able to map their experience and their ability to do the job. This is a great way to do this. This is a much better question to ask than, “Do you have experience with digital marketing?” That’s too easy to say yes. Have someone walk you through their day-to-day and be as detailed as possible.

QUESTION #3 – LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT

Another great question to ask the candidate is about their leadership and management style. You can first see how they describe themselves as a leader or a manager. Then you can ask them for examples. Maybe an example of how they impacted a winning team, or an example of how they turned around a losing team, or something of that nature. But what you want them to do is to give you examples of how they’ve applied their leadership and management style and what the outcome was.

QUESTION #4 – GAME PLAN

Another critical question that you can ask, and that we recommend with all executive hires as a part of the interview process, is to have that person put together a 30, 60 and 90 day plan of what they’re going to do in their first quarter at the job. You may need to provide them with certain information to do this, but this can be an extremely useful exercise, and will give you some real insight into what to expect when this person comes in on the job. Interviews need to go much further beyond how you feel about a person and how they answer questions. They need to go into and give you as much information on how somebody would actually execute the responsibilities of the job. This is a really great way to do that.

QUESTION #5 – CULTURE

A final critical question that we recommend be involved with all executive hires, and really all hires for that matter, is to talk to them about culture. You should have a defined company culture that includes core values, a mission statement and anything else that truly outlines the culture and personality of your company and of your brand. There should be a discussion as part of the interview around what this is. Allow the candidate to ask questions. Ask them questions. Find out how they feel about your company and your culture. Find out how they see themselves fitting in and how they would enrich and add to that culture. Hiring for culture-fit is one of the most challenging things. Someone who checks all the boxes from a technical perspective that doesn’t fit in from a cultural perspective is never going to last. So it’s important to have this as part of your interview process.

CONCLUSION

The five above questions will give you a ton of insight into someone’s ability to be able to do your job, as well as how they would fit into the company. Combining them with potentially other technical questions and maybe other specifics about the job are going to give you a really powerful insight into whether this person would or would not be a fit for the role. If you’re able to apply these questions across multiple candidates, you’re truly going to be able to tell who’s the best fit. As a side note, we recommend using personality assessments, like the DISC assessment, as a supplemental piece to your interview process. These can help give some other insight into how people would handle the job. 

Best of luck!

Looking for more questions to ask? Try these: https://bit.ly/2MRlpt7

Looking to Hire Superstar Talent? We would love to work with you! Contact us for an exploratory call!

Why Are My Candidates Dropping Out Of The Hiring Process? - Lance Winsaft

This may be a problem that is plaguing your recruiting efforts. If you are experiencing an influx of candidates that begin your interview process but then drop out mid-way or toward the end, this is an extremely frustrating thing to happen. Spending time with people up front to have them only drop out later down the road can seem like a major waste of time and can put a huge drain on any recruiter or hiring manager’s energy when it comes to hiring talent. 

A COMPETITIVE MARKET

The market is extremely competitive right now and there is a lot of competition for really solid candidates in the market. The best candidates in the market are also currently working, so this adds another level of competition. Most of the candidates that we are representing are currently working and entertaining multiple offers, as well as counter offers from their current employer. This landscape is making it extremely difficult for companies to hire the right talent and often times results in a lot of time spent upfront that doesn’t turn into anything. This can seem like a waste of time, but it’s also part of how things are right now. The good news is that there are steps that you can take with your hiring process to hedge your bets and to improve this fall off rate.

FIND THE INEFFICIENCIES IN YOUR PROCESS

First and foremost, if you are experiencing a high volume of candidates dropping out of your hiring process, it’s likely there are several inefficiencies built into your process that are turning candidates off. And if you’re not turning candidates off, then you’re just not doing a good job of turning them on. It’s even more important in this market to turn a candidate on than to simply not turn them off. Unfortunately, most companies’ hiring processes turns candidates off, some leave candidates neutral, and very few are turning candidates on. Those who are able to excite candidates about their company and get them really engaged in the opportunity and have the process be smooth and effective are the ones who are getting the best talent.

INCREASING YOUR ACQUISITION RATE

So what are some of the things that you can do to increase your acquisition rate here? The first place to start is to look at what some of the common mistakes are. First and foremost, if you’re having candidates dropping out of your hiring process, it’s likely one major culprit is that you are unorganized when it comes to scheduling interviews and providing feedback. You are either unorganized or you are too slow here, or a combination of both. Candidates are getting communication and are likely being headhunted by multiple companies, so you’ve got to have an organized process and you’ve got to move fast. Remember that your interview process is the first experience that a candidate has with your company and is going to give them a lot of insight into how your company works. You want human resources and recruiting to be acting consistent with your core values and your company’s employer brand. So it’s critical that this process is extremely organized, detail oriented and provides a concierge service.

WINING AND DINING YOUR CANDIDATES

You want candidates to experience being truly valued and taken care of as they go through your interview process. It’s critical that they feel important and even feel special. This type of “wining and dining” goes a long way. That’s not to say you need to take candidates out to eat or anything like that, but providing a level of detail that gives them a concierge service is going to go a very long way and much of your competition is not doing that.

HAVING A FAST MOVING PROCESS

The other thing is that your process needs to move quickly. Often times human resources has a hard time getting feedback from hiring managers or other people involved in the hiring process. If this is an issue within your company, you need to call a meeting right away and get all the hiring managers on the same page when it comes to feedback. Many of our clients have issues when it comes to getting feedback from hiring managers and this is something that we see a lot of human resources professionals tolerate. The toleration of lazy or slow hiring managers who are too busy to get back to you is going to be one of the biggest issues you will have when it comes to acquiring talent. You need to get hiring managers on the same page, and you need to whip them into shape, so that they are on your team and they are clear about the importance of detailed feedback. Along those lines, hiring managers need to be trained on how to interview and how to represent the company to potential candidates. Oftentimes, human resources does a good job of keeping things organized, but then the hiring managers, who are not trained in interviewing and have never been trained in interviewing, blow it when it comes to doing the interviews and turn candidates off. You’ve got to have your hiring managers and your leadership team trained to be effective interviewers who represent your company effectively.

INTERVIEWS GO BOTH WAYS

Dealing with what we’ve talked about so far in this blog is going to go an extremely long way to you stopping the bleeding of having candidates dropping out of your hiring process. It’s important that your hiring process also communicates things about the culture and about the company itself. You can’t have an interview be all one-sided about you asking candidates about their experience and whatnot. In a competitive market, candidates are feeling different companies out and so the interview truly is going both ways. You’ve got to give your candidates an opportunity to learn about you and learn about what you do. You want them to really get a sense for your culture and what it’s like to work for you, what makes you different, etc. This is critical and is the best opportunity for you to really turn a candidate on to your company and your organization and the position. Again, hiring managers need to be up to speed when it comes to this part of the hiring process, and it needs to be a structured part of your interview process.

KEEPING A PULSE ALONG THE WAY

It’s important along the way in your interview process as well, to be checking in with candidates about where they are in the hiring process with any other companies. This will also allow you to gauge how much effort and speed needs to go into an individual person, depending on your level of interest in them. Keeping a pulse on this is going to be critical and also goes a long way to you building a relationship with that candidate, which is also going to keep them in your process.

CONCLUSION

These are a few tips that will go a long way to keeping candidates in your hiring process. There are many other things that you can do and there are a lot of ways that this blog could be broken down to go into detail on how to implement some of these things. If you’re interested in more of that, you should contact us about some of our coaching workshops. 

Best of luck!

PROS AND CONS OF JOB BOARDS FOR RECRUITING

NAVIGATING JOB BOARD OPTIONS

Today we’re talking about using job boards for recruiting and what posting on a job board is worth.

With so many choices available, there are pros and cons to using job boards and I want to go over some of those here in this post.

If you’re looking to hire talent, there are a lot of options to find potential candidates for open positions within your company.

It may seem overwhelming with so many job board options, artificial intelligence software, recruiters, staffing agencies, and more.

ARE JOB BOARDS WORTH IT?

The question is are companies like Monster, Careerbuilder, Zip Recruiter, Indeed, and other job boards worth spending the money on.

It’s very likely if you are looking to fill open positions at your company that you’re in one of a few different positions.

If you don’t have enough outbound recruiting man power you’re likely trying to find ways to passively attract talent to your company.

Job boards like mentioned above can seem like a good option.

Looking into options, you will notice they can be very expensive and it may be challenging to know which option to choose.

PICKING AND CHOOSING FOR YOUR NEEDS

The most important thing to understand is that job boards are good for certain positions only.

Job boards should be used primarily for low level entry level positions.

Ideally, roles that are administrative or don’t require a lot of specialized education or skills are best for job boards.

Job boards lose their effectiveness the more specialized you get with a position, especially with more senior roles.

Once you start to get to the manager, director, VP or above, job boards are going to become increasingly less effective.

QUANTITY OVER QUALITY

One way or another, with job boards, you’re going to have to allot time to sift through an abundance of resumes.

Using job boards for recruiting will get you a high quantity of resumes, but the quality of those resumes and candidates is going to be very low.

You will likely reject eight or nine out of every 10 resumes that come through for your position.

You or someone on your staff will need to sift through these initial resumes and weed out the ones that are simply junk.

Many job boards today allow candidates to apply to multiple positions at once.

Therefore candidates are not necessarily looking at job descriptions or job requirements.

Often candidates are just blasting their resume out to as many positions as possible hoping that something will stick.

This shotgun affect makes it a headache for anyone who has to sift through hundreds of resumes to find only a few potentials.

For certain roles this can be good, but for many roles it isn’t worth it.

You may not have the staff or the time to go through all these resumes, therefore this may not be a good option for you.

SIFTING THROUGH THE MESS

The other thing to consider is that for the most part, people who are applying on job boards are not currently working.

Candidates without jobs who are actively looking may not be where the best talent tends to lie.

You may want to consider talent that is not actively and aggressively looking for a new position, or maybe not looking at all.

People working effectively for your competition may have the time to find a new position.

With this in mind, you’re likely not going to be tapping into the passive job market.

So you are limiting yourself greatly to the pool of talent that are the active talent.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some good people out there applying on job boards, but they are the exception to the rule.

IS THE COST WORTH THE PAYOFF?

The other tricky aspect with job boards is that you never can know which is the best one for your market.

Unless you are in an extremely specialized field like healthcare, engineering or software development, you won’t know which job board is best.

In these cases, it’s likely you will need memberships with multiple job boards which can get expensive.

The costs for membership and the time to speak to and sift through the high volume of resumes can be costly.

You’re likely better off hiring an internal headhunter or an external headhunting agency like us to do that work on your behalf.

HIRING A RECRUITER

One thing to keep in mind is to never hire a recruiting company that is going to post on job boards on your behalf.

Those are lazy recruiters and if you’re going to hire a recruiter they should be tapping into the passive market mentioned above.

A recruiter is likely going to be slightly more expensive, but you’re going to get much more bang for your buck.

Also your life is going to be a whole lot easier and your experience hiring will be much more streamlined.

IN CONCLUSION

Job boards can work, but they take a lot of work to manage and can end up being very expensive.

I recommend doing a cost-benefit analysis.

You really want to look and see what you’re going to get with a recruiter versus what you would get with the job boards.

You’ll certainly attract better candidates going with the recruiter.

In any case, find and do what works best for you and your business.

HIRING REMOTE, PARTIAL REMOTE, AND TELECOMMUTE WORKERS - Lance Winsaft

Today we’re talking about the pros and cons of hiring remote workers or employing remote or telecommute workers.

It’s important to keep in mind that all businesses are different and this may not work for everyone.

Some businesses are prone to work very well with remote workers while others are not designed to have remote teams.

It’s important to pay attention to this because if your business is a good candidate for remote workers, you can greatly benefit.

If your business is not conducive to hiring remote workers this article may not be relevant to you.

If you want to consider this, you’ll need to see what changes you can make to take advantage of remote workers.

REMOTE WORKERS ARE TRENDING

There is currently a large trend for candidates that are interested in the ability to work remote or partially remote.

Many people nowadays are putting much more emphasis on their work-life balance.

Being able to work remote offers people the flexibility to have their work-life schedule be more balanced.

Many people also work better remote then they do in an office environment.

The office environment can often have many distractions with other coworkers or other things going on.

This of course depends on your office culture, office environment and the type of people that you hire.

Many extremely talented people who are at the top of their field are only interested in working with this flexibility.

THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN HIRING REMOTE

Being open to hiring remote workers opens you up to a segment of the market that you may be missing out on.

If you are thinking of hiring remote workers, you have to consider how that will fit into your existing culture.

If your existing culture is one where everyone is in the office and then you hire someone remote, this could cause friction.

You could produce dissension in the ranks of your employees who might feel left out or jealous if the new person gets to work remote but they don’t.

TRANSITIONING TO HAVING REMOTE WORKERS

If you’re considering taking this on, you want to take inventory on whether your current employees can work remote.

Perhaps you make working remote more like a benefit to be attained if someone reaches certain KPI’s or metrics.

Many sales people are extremely effective working remote.

WHICH POSITIONS WORK BEST REMOTELY

If someone travels a lot and they’re mostly on site with clients, there really is no need to have them in office.

 You can benefit greatly from a rockstar sales person being somewhere else in the country.

Customer service folks and account management people also function very well in a remote capacity.

Believe it or not, accounting folks and financial people can also work very well remote.

You might want to think about having your internal financial people working remote as well.

WHO IS THE RIGHT FIT FOR REMOTE WORK

When hiring remote you should know if they are the kind of personality that’s productive in a remote function.

There are many people who if left to their own devices will not get the work done that needs to get done.

If you have those kind of people working remote you will see a slump in productivity.

Your people should know that their ability to work remote goes hand-in-hand with the results they are on the hook to produce.

In other words working remote should be slated more like a privilege or a benefit that is earned rather than a “right.”

Another trick to hiring a solid remote employee is hiring someone who has been successful working remote in the past.

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

There’s also incorporate partial telecommuting where your team is in the office 3-4 days and remote 1-2 days a week.

This model can provide the best of both worlds for you and your employees.

Then you can accomplish the things you need with the team together and have the balance of working remote some days.

This is a very common model that’s being adopted by many companies and is being extremely successful.

This model works if all of your employees are local as you’ll need them in the office together certain days of the week.

RECRUITING REMOTE WORKERS

If you are going to go after remote workers it may be challenging from a recruiting perspective.

Recruiting firms like us are extremely solid resources for being able to tap into other markets for remote work.

Remember, the challenge will be instead of just recruiting in your city you’re going to be recruiting nationwide.

You may even be just recruiting in certain times zones.

Your pool of people to reach out to is going to increase dramatically.

You will need to have a strategy for how to tap into those markets and find the best talent.

Keep in mind that it will likely take a lot of volume, so leaning on a recruiter can be a very valuable resource for tapping into that market.

CONCLUSION

Look at remote and telecommute working as a way to tap into a segment of the market with more great talent.

This is a segment of the market that is growing as more and more people are looking for that work-life balance.

More and more people are looking for the ability to have flexibility around their work schedules.

Many of these types of people can be extremely high producers and will produce better with this type of flexibility.

As managers it’s important for us to focus on hiring the right personalities that can work well autonomously.

This can be more productive for managers also, not having to control and micromanage everybody.

You owe it to yourself to explore this a bit further and see if it’s something that can work for your business.

INTERVIEW QUESTIONS AND TIPS FOR EMPLOYERS - LANCE WINSAFT

Today Lance Winsaft is sharing interview tips for employers so that you can hone in on hiring the right candidates. 

We’ll also share some of the best interview questions to ask potential candidates.

We often hear from clients that it’s difficult to ensure they’re interviewing the right people with the right skillsets.

This can be even more challenging when a role has increasing levels of technical skills and requirements needed.

THINGS TO CONSIDER 

It can be easier to tell if somebody is a good cultural fit if you can have them interview with your team members.

You can tell if they would fit in with the culture or have the right personality if they do well with your team members.

It’s often difficult to determine if someone has the right skillset to be able to execute in the manner that you need.

We’ve heard many horror stories about candidates that interviewed really well, but weren’t a good fit.

Candidates can sell themselves and seem like they can do the job, when actually they don’t have what it takes.

However, when they start and get in the seat, it becomes clear that they are not the right fit.

Often they actually don’t have the skills or the experience needed to execute the job.

FINDING THE RIGHT CULTURAL FIT

Making a bad hire is a nightmare scenario for many companies and it’s a major waste of money and time.

It’s important that your process includes the right questions and steps needed to weed out the right hires.

READING AND SIFTING THROUGH RESUMES 

It all starts with making sure you have a good strategy for reviewing resumes.

Resumes come in many different forms and it’s important that not too much weight is put on them.

There’s likely a whole lot of someone’s experience that may not be on a resume.

Be careful not to lose out on people that could be good because you’re judging a book by its cover.

THE INTERVIEW STAGE

Once you get to the interview stage there are a lot of different strategies you can take.

This really depends on the type of role that you’re looking to fill.

ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

You want to have some general questions that are open ended or generic questions.

You never want to lead to witness.

Don’t want to ask questions like, “do you consider yourself a hard worker?”

The answer is always going to be yes.

You also don’t want to ask;

“Do you have experience with this software?” Or “Do you have experience with this type of industry?”

It’s too easy of a yes or no question for a candid answer.

You’ll likely get yeses even if the person doesn’t have that experience.

They might not have the experience that you need, so you haven’t really learned anything in this situation.

Ask open ended questions like;

“Tell me about the client experience you have” or, “tell me about the different software you’ve used?”

These open ended questions leave them having to fill in the blanks versus just telling you what you want to hear.

You can also pose hypothetical situations and ask them what they would do in certain situations.

You want to know how they would handle if something happened or if they needed to produce an outcome.

There is a way to get into their head about their thought process and how they would deal with certain situations.

ASKING MORE TECHNICAL QUESTIONS

You can start to get more technical with the role and hear how they would use certain technical things.

Another useful question is to ask about some major challenges that they have been faced with.

Listen to what someone considers a challenge and how they would deal with that challenge.

Knowing how they dealt with the challenge will give you a lot of insight into that person.

FINDING THE RIGHT SKILLSET 

At some point in your interview process, you should think about having a way to test their skills.

This is easy with technical type positions such as a developer, programmer or a coder.

You can easily devise a test that shows people’s coding or development capabilities, or lack thereof.

This becomes a little more challenging when you’re dealing with people on the marketing and sales side of things.

There are still ways to devise a simple project, case study, or presentation for them to do.

Think about what this person will be doing daily and what kind of skills they need to have.

Your process should allow them to demonstrate that they can do what you need, and how they would do it.

FINDING THE RIGHT PERSONALITY

Many companies are now integrating personality assessments in their hiring process which can be very useful.

A Disk Assessment, Talent Plus or the large variety of other talent assessment consulting companies are all resources.

These tests can tell you a lot about someone’s personality and how they may fit and work within your company.

The important thing is to take all the information from them with a grain of salt.

Don’t put too much weight on these tests as they’re standardized.

There is never a substitute for talking to people and feeling them out personally.

The level of usefulness of these assessments has a limit.

You need to make sure you’re responsible for how you use them.

IN CONCLUSION

At the end of the day there is a lot that can be done to design an effective interview process.

Your process should determine if a candidate is a fit culturally and for the hard and tactical skills needed.

There are different strategies to take depending on what kind of role you’re looking to fill.

Whether the role is technical, sales related, marketing, creative, etc., you want to be able to hone in on what you need.

It’s important to keep that in mind as you design whatever process you put those people through.

You want to design a process to be effective, as the impacts of making a bad hire can be severe and debilitating.

TIPS FOR NEGOTIATING SALARY FOR EMPLOYERS AND JOBSEEKERS - Lance Winsaft

TIPS FOR NEGOTIATING SALARY 

Today we’re sharing tips for both employers and jobseekers who are considering accepting or negotiating a salary offer.

You should know there are different strategies to take depending on your situation for both employers and jobseekers.

Your strategy depends on if you are negotiating with each other directly or if there is a recruiter who is negotiating on your behalf.

WORKING WITH A RECRUITER

If there is a recruiter in the mix, you need to be clear about how much you trust them to represent and negotiate for both parties.

There are a lot of different recruiters out there and many of them are good at negotiating and many aren’t.

If you’re working with someone, you want to be sure you can trust that they are going to be able to handle both parties interests.

FOR THE JOBSEEKER

If you’re a job seeker and working with a recruiter, you definitely want to take whatever advice that recruiter is giving you.

The recruiter is likely going to have your best interest in mind and do everything they can to negotiate the highest salary possible.

Recruiters’ commissions are going to be based off of your final salary, so it really is in their best interest to negotiate the best possible salary.

The thing to keep in mind is that often by the time you get an offer, the recruiter will have already done some significant negotiating on your end.

Although it may be the first time you’re seeing an offer, it’s likely not the first time that potential employer has been in the negotiation process.

So you want to keep the above in mind as you don’t want to be in a position to over negotiate.

BEING CLEAR, CONCISE AND PREPARED

The last thing that you want to do is go back-and-forth with your prospective employer too many times.

This can make you seem nit-picky and could just annoy and or upset at the situation.

One way to avoid this is when you do an initial review of your offer be sure that you collect any and all questions that you have.

Many jobseekers make the mistake of going back and forth finding concerns and asking questions.

This can get annoying and makes you seem unorganized.

COMMUNICATING SALARY EXPECTATIONS

When working with a recruiter, it’s also in your best interest to be upfront about your current salary.

Many states are now employing laws which make it illegal for recruiters or companies to ask candidates what your current salary is.

The purpose of these laws is to avoid gender discrimination, not so that people can hide their salary and try to get more money.

It will be obvious to the recruiter if you do this.

The truth of the matter is that nine time out of ten, being upfront about your current salary is your best ammunition.

If you’re being underpaid, you can use that as an argument for why you want an increase.

If you aren’t being underpaid you can use your current salary as a basis for a certain percentage of increase.

In other words, it’s better to have a stand off point in your argument for certain salary expectations.

You don’t want to have a certain salary expectation based off of nothing.

Most of the time this is going to help, especially if you are working with a recruiter.

A recruiter will be able to take that information and really frame it with their client to really sell you with your requested salary.

WHAT JOBSEEKERS CAN EXPECT

Also, be sure that you don’t get offended if your first number on the offer is a bit off.

Many companies tend to come in with a lowball offer at first.

This is fairly normal and you want to make sure that you don’t take something like this personally.

This can be a red flag in some situations, but normally it’s just a starting off point knowing that there’s going to be some back-and-forth.

Be professional about it and remind them what your expectations are and what your current salary is.

You can also remind them of your justifications and your logical case for the salary that you are expecting.

The more evidence and logic you’re able to bring to the situation about your salary expectation, the better.

SALARY IS NOT EVERYTHING

You want to make sure you get a clear picture of all the benefits that come with the role you’re negotiating for.

Things like bonuses, health insurance, life insurance, 401(k) and disability should all be considered.

There are many other perks that companies are now instituting like food perks, dry cleaning, vacation, paid days off, remote days, short days in the summer, and the list goes on.

Many of these bonuses, benefits and perks are difficult to monetize, but add up to a lot of money within any given year.

It’s very important that you keep all of this in mind as these things can have a major impact on your overall compensation.

These things also greatly impact the quality of your work and life balance.

So it’s very important that you take it all in a consideration and don’t get too stuck on a salary number.

We’ve seen many candidates get stuck on a salary number and miss out on a great opportunity.

You want to be sure you’re taking the whole picture into account.

FOR THE EMPLOYERS

It’s important that you avoid the aforementioned initial lowball offer.

Be up front with people and let them know what your ranges are early on in the process.

Get expectations from people early on in the process.

You can ask questions as to why they are expecting a certain salary.

Be sure yon’t break the law in your state if you’re not allowed to ask about their current salary.

HAVING A SALARY AND BENEFITS PACKAGE

Have a really well thought-out and put-together benefits document showing as much as possible.

This will show the details of the monetary amount of your benefits package.

A well put together benefits package is really going to help supplement any salary offer that you make.

You’ll be able to justify a lower salary or market salary with candidates if you are also offering a competitive benefits package.

It’s important that you are clear with people throughout the process and you make sure they are clear with you about expectations.

You don’t want to waste your time getting all the way through your interview process with someone that you like, only to have a deal fall apart.

This can happen if you don’t communicate clearly and aren’t in the same ballpark when it comes to compensation.

It’s also not a good idea to come in with your first number as your maximum, unless of course this has been discussed with the candidate beforehand.

Most candidates are expecting to be able to negotiate or pushback on the salary at least once and get a little bit higher than the initial offer.

There is a very important emotional and psychological aspect of people accepting offers.

No one likes to just lay down and accept the first offer.

People want to feel like they pushed back and then someone gave in because they really like them.

The last thing you want is for someone to feel OK about accepting the offer and then to show up on day one feeling just OK having accepted the job.

You want people excited about the role and to feel wanted.

CONCLUSION

These are just a few tips you can take into consideration.

The tips in this blog can go a long way to getting the best offer for yourself and also for the company.

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