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Hindustan Times
3 days ago
- Business
- Hindustan Times
A short guide to salary negotiations
Talking about how much money you earn is uncomfortable for many people. But there are moments when it is an unavoidable topic of conversation. When you take a new job or learn how much your raise will be for the coming year, you have to talk about salaries. You also have to make a decision about whether to negotiate for more. Negotiating does seem to pay off, at least in monetary terms. In its 2025 survey of American jobseekers, Employ, a recruiting-software provider, found that 37% of candidates had asked for more money, and that 80% of them had got more than their initial offer. That is consistent with a paper published in 2011 by Michelle Marks of the University of Colorado and Crystal Harold of Temple University, which found that candidates who chose to bargain bumped up their starting salaries by an average of $5,000 ($7,160 in today's money). Negotiating, which is the subject of this week's episode of our Boss Class podcast, comes more naturally to some than others. A recent study by Jackson Lu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked at 19 consecutive years of MBA graduates from an American business school, and found that graduates of East Asian and South-East Asian ethnicity had markedly lower salaries than South Asians and whites. The propensity to negotiate among different groups explains the gap; East Asians and South-East Asians who did not try to negotiate were more likely to say they were concerned about damaging the relationship with an employer. Women are more likely than men to worry about the effect of negotiating—with some cause. As part of a paper on salary negotiations published in 2024, Francesco Capozza of the Berlin Social Science Centre conducted a survey of HR managers in America. The respondents thought that candidates who attempted to negotiate on pay were less likely to receive a job offer than those who did not, and that this penalty hit women disproportionately hard. If negotiating both raises salaries and risks a backlash, what is a bargainer to do? Leigh Thompson, who teaches at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, gives two pieces of advice to her MBA students as they look for work. One is not to start negotiating until you actually have a job offer (further evidence that MBAs may lack many things but confidence isn't one of them). The other is not to turn a negotiation into a bidding war, deliberately playing potential employers off against each other to extract higher offers. Don't be combative, she says. Don't threaten. Jim Sebenius, who teaches negotiating at Harvard Business School, advises scoping out the role as fully as possible and then finding the market rate for that sort of job. Information on pay is much easier to find than it was, owing to sites such as GlassDoor, and requirements in some places to publish salary ranges for advertised roles. If candidates can attach themselves to a reasonable principle—that they only want to be paid the going rate—and point to evidence to back up their argument, that is more likely to work than arbitrary numbers, begging or threats to go elsewhere. Even if more money isn't available, other things might be on the table: a promise to review pay after a certain period, named parking bays or whatever floats your boat. It can be annoying for bosses to hear requests for more money, when all they really want is unbridled enthusiasm. But some employers actively want people to be good at negotiating. Photoroom is a French AI startup that makes photo-editing software; it offers negotiating training to anyone at the firm who wants it. Its primary goal is to enable engineers to buy kit fast without getting lost in red tape; the training helps them to do so at a good price. Matt Rouif, its boss, says Photoroom also wants to know if it is paying below market rate; it buys in benchmark data on salaries and shares that data with employees so that conversations have a common starting-point. 'A lot of people think it's a fight. We're trying to find the best outcome that looks fair.' That's not a bad way for employees to frame a salary negotiation, either. Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines to 100 year archives.
Economist
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Economist
Presentations: It's all in the knees
RADA, a world-famous acting school, has trained Anthony Hopkins, Alan Rickman and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Add to that list Boss Class host Andrew Palmer. In this episode, he gets tips on how to be a better public speaker. To listen to the full series, subscribe to Economist Podcasts+. Episodes are out on Mondays. If you're already a subscriber to The Economist, you have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.
Business Times
15-05-2025
- Business
- Business Times
The myths of corporate innovation
IF innovation has an iconography, it involves a genius, a breakthrough and a dash of serendipity. Alexander Fleming notices mould growing on a plate of bacteria and discovers penicillin. John Snow produces a map of the victims of a cholera outbreak in 19th-century London and traces the outbreak to a single water pump. A German chemist called August Kekule falls asleep, dreams about snakes eating their tails and realises upon waking that the benzene molecule has the shape of a ring. Moments like these make for good film scenes, but they are precisely the wrong way to think about corporate innovation. Firms make advances through sustained effort, the passage of time and teamwork. Take, for example, three stories of innovation from the new season of Boss Class, our podcast on how to be a great manager. Wayve, a self-driving software firm that is now one of Europe's hottest artificial intelligence (AI) startups, was an outlier for years. Alex Kendall, a co-founder, was studying at Cambridge when he became convinced that the best way to solve the self-driving problem was to have an AI learn patterns of driving behaviour for itself. That made him unusual. At the time, the industry was trying to write rules for what a car should do when it encounters a specific situation. Wayve's approach is much more orthodox now; last month, the firm signed a deal with Nissan to be part of the Japanese carmaker's autonomous-driving technology. But it has been an eight-year effort to get there. 'The biggest b******* is eureka ideas where you just wake up and have an idea that solves things,' said Kendall. A good idea can go nowhere if the circumstances are not right. By the same token, having tried something before is not a reason to ignore it in the future, as the case of Google shows. Liz Reid, its head of search, said that many of the tech giant's successes were tried several times before they finally caught on. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up One example is reviews for restaurants on Google Maps, a feature that the team was sure would be useful, but that initially asked too much of reviewers. The arrival of notifications and of location data was crucial. Before then, you had to remember to write a review or indeed, where you had been to eat. After that, Google's knowledge that you had been to eat in a specific restaurant, and its ability to prompt you to give a rating, made reviewing much simpler. Finally, consider Monumental, a four-year-old Dutch startup that is trying to mechanise bricklaying by using robots. It depends on constant feedback to improve. Salar al-Khafaji, a co-founder, sold his first startup to Palantir, a data analytics giant; there he saw the practice of 'forward deployment', whereby Palantir's developers work directly with customers to configure its software to suit their needs. His new firm adopts a similar principle of getting out into the real world. Monumental acts as a subcontractor on construction jobs, using human masons to finish any work that its machines cannot do. Working on projects in this way gives Monumental both a flow of money and, even more usefully, information about all the problems it has yet to overcome. Building sites are messy, unstructured places, where things get moved, weather changes and lots of things can go wrong. Operators on the site note down every glitch and obstacle that the robots encounter in a shared 'friction log'; engineers and coders at the firm's headquarters in Amsterdam try to resolve them. Companies achieve big breakthroughs all the time. Dramatic scenes can unfold. Wayve chose to train its cars on the streets of London, because the city's narrow streets, cyclists and jaywalkers make for a particularly testing environment for drivers. Late last year, the firm tested its software for the first time in America: on its first day, the car learnt for itself to drive on the right side of the road, as well as mastering other oddities. You can almost hear the soaring music in the film version. But, for the most part, corporate innovation is not cinematic. The myths of lone geniuses and moments of inspiration undoubtedly capture the imagination. But the reality – of problems solved by groups of determined people over many years – is an even better story. ©2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved
Economist
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Economist
Agony in Gaza as Israel blocks aid
A ceasefire becomes ever more urgent in Gaza as Israel expands military operations and obstructs aid. As Donald Trump arrives in Saudi Arabia, the regional balance of power has shifted since his last term (9:55). Also on the show: introducing series two of 'Boss Class', on how to be a better manager (17:44). And we need your feedback! Please take our survey. Runtime: 24 min
