The employee or job seeker about to negotiate his salary will want to be well prepared and have the knowledge to avoid the many pitfalls on the road to a successful salary negotiation. The Internet appears to be a valuable source of information to fulfill these aims. However, when going on “the Net”, most people choose a route that leads to certain failure instead of success.
Type “negotiate salary” into Google and what appears in the top “organic” results are links to job searching websites and other websites and blogs providing information for job seekers. There are loads of information on salary negotiations.
All these Internet sources of information on this subject have some things in common. The information is always brief, giving an appearance of a salary negotiation being a quite simple thing. The information always lacks systematization, making it hard to get an overview. There is never any explanation as to why some negotiation techniques work while others don’t, meaning that the job seeker or employee can never make an unbiased judgment as to whether a certain salary negotiation tip is good or not.
Using this information is a quite safe route to failure when negotiating the salary. The main reason for this is that this information gives the employee or job seeker a feeling of satisfaction or of being well prepared. Given that the information is always incomplete and unstructured, this results in the salary negotiator entering the negotiation under false assumptions, making him an easy target for the employer.
It is not a coincidence that most information on the Net on how to negotiate a salary leads the employee or job seeker to failure. The poor quality of the information is a result of the simple but hidden fact that the websites providing the information are on the employers’ payrolls.
The customers of the job searching sites are the employers and not the employees. It is the employers that pay their bills. And since the employers have no interest in the employees becoming really good at negotiating their salaries, the job searching sites have no such interest either.
The salary negotiation information is published on their websites to attract Internet traffic, i.e. people looking for jobs that can be passed on to the employers. The information is not published to make master negotiators of the website visitors.
The sum of it all is that the job searching sites and employers get what they want, while the employees and job seekers only find information that they don’t even know was not published to benefit them (but the job searching sites) and that will make them fail when negotiating their salaries. Therefore, making the wrong choices on the Internet is a safe route to failure when negotiating the salary.