Pursuits

The Art of Haggling

When fighting for a new salary, it’s all about the first number on the table

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By Claire Suddath

November 21, 2012 at 9:11 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

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This article is part of the November 26, 2012 issue of businessweek.

I don’t like to haggle. The last time I tried to bargain I was 12 years old and trying to get my parents to let me watch an R-rated movie. (I still haven’t seen Speed.) So when I heard that Henrique de Castro used a job offer from Yahoo! to set off a bidding war with Google and ended up with a $61 million package, I thought, how did he do that? Wait—can I do that? If not $61 million, maybe six? I would be totally fine with $6 million.

To improve my chances I called salary negotiations expert Victoria Pynchon, founder of the She Negotiates consultancy. The biggest hurdle, Pynchon says, is that most of us have no idea what people in similar positions make. “When you buy a house, you get an appraiser and compare it to similar homes in the area. So why wouldn’t you do that with your job?”