Breaking Salary Bands: Top Executives Can Earn $1M+ When Job Posts Says $285K

Hey all. Today I want to talk a little bit about salary ranges and benchmarks and how they may actually be working against you. So just the other day I saw a post for a senior director role at a Fortune 50 company and it said the salary range was 185,000 to about 285,000. That's all it said. Not a lot of details, nothing about the bonuses, traditional job description, a couple hundred applicants. The typical thing. You see the problem is six weeks prior to that, I just helped another client of mine land a senior director role at the same company. So same title and we landed at 1.1 million a year in compensation. So where's the mismatch here? So what I found is that oftentimes salary transparency works against us. It's the desired rate, not necessarily gospel. I found that the benchmarks where we see other executives are making X amount, therefore I should make X amount really doesn't matter in the scheme of things, especially for the executive leaders I work with. They're often responsible for creating those bans. So them better than anyone else should understand that those ranges can be broken. I've also found that the salary transparency laws serve to work against the people that it's designed to help, typically women in minorities who may be less inclined to negotiate or push those boundaries and simply try to fit inside that box. That's not okay. So my challenge for everyone is they see job descriptions and they see salary ranges and they want to creep it up so they don't even apply and don't even bother take the shot anyway. It's more important for you to work through the interview process and show how much value that you can bring to the position. Expand the pie, so to speak. Spend more time asking questions about the hiring manager, the team, the cross functional elements that you'll need to be supporting with your leadership. You need to spend a lot more time in a discovery process to really understand where the real pain is. Your job is to be so valuable that the company can't see hiring anyone else. Ultimately, this is creating a lot of leverage for you. Additionally, you should be working to create alternative options for yourself, even if the option is to simply say no and walk away. If you're doing all of these things, naturally you're going to build more negotiation leverage. And then when we go to push back once you get an offer, we can oftentimes break that range by using terms like can you help me understand what we can do to move this deal forward? It looks like this range is a bit less than what we are expecting based off of the scope of the role that we outlined here. What can we do to improve that? Or it sounds like we both want to work together here. How can we make that great for both of us? So my word of caution for you don't take salary ranges as gospel. Don't only look at the benchmark reports that you see from communities and big company reports and research companies that say you know expected range for someone like you is x amount. Oftentimes we are relegating ourselves to the medium and the mediocre compensation bans and we limit ourselves by putting this self imposed anchor. Instead we concentrate on creating value, being the most valuable person, eliminating your competition so the employer has no choice but to ideally give in to your demands or your request to bump that compensation upward. For more tips like this, like and subscribe. I'll share each week and would love to see your questions in the comments and I will get to them as soon as possible. Thank you for stopping by.