Heres one mistake you should avoid making in salary negotiations

Heres one mistake you should avoid making in salary negotiationsHeres one mistake you should avoid making in salary negotiationsHow early in the job process should you ask about pay? Its a delicate dance. Too late, and youve wasted a lot of time for a job that cant support your obligations. Too early, and the question looks presumptuous.Thats the thorny patch that, Taylor Byrnes, a woman in Winnipeg, fell into this week. She asked about pay after her first vorstellungsgesprch, at which point the company representative, offended, cancelled her second interview.Byrnes tweeted about the experience, and it became a viral sensation, capturing the frustration of many job candidates who have trouble with salary negotiations.Heres what happened.After an initial phone interview at SkipTheDishes, an online food delivery service that operates in Canada and the U.S., Byrnes had decided to email human resources about benefits and her potential salary It was here where things went awry for Byrnes. Your priorities about pay are not in sync with those of SkipTheDishesByrnes emailed SkipTheDishes, how much do you think Ill be getting paid an hour? Benefits will also be included, right?She didnt get the answer she wanted.In her reply to Byrnes, Victoria Karras, a talent acquisition coordinator for the company, cancelled the next interview, saying, your questions reveal that your priorities are not in sync with those of SkipTheDishes.In a follow-up email to Byrnes, Karras expanded on what exactly those priorities were Our corporate culture may be unique in this way, but it is paramount that staff display intrinsic motivation and are proven self-starters. For these reasons, questions about compensation and benefits at such an early stage is a concern related to organizational fit.Some on Twitter followedByrnes call to boycott SkipTheDishes, believingthat asking about benefits was the sign of a motivated person. To count an interviewerout for asking about pay was a red flag about th e companys labor practices, they argued.SkipTheDishes apologizes, offers Byrnes that second interviewAfter Byrnes experience went viral, SkipTheDishes co-founder Joshua Simair wrote a statement explaining how the company had been wrong.We are very disappointed in how it was handled. We do share a compensation package prior to hiring. As soon as we became aware of it on Monday, we reached out to Taylor to apologize for the email and reschedule her interview, he said, adding that staff would receive additional training.How SkipTheDishes couldve handled this betterThere are takeaways for job seekers and employers with this story.For companies and hiring managers dont treat pay as a frivolous question. Its a core parte of why people work. SkipTheDishes should have reframed their tone. If Karrasreally felt that pressed about the salary question, shecould have just told Byrnes that this was not an appropriate time to ask about salary and left it at that. There was no need for backhanded i nsults about an applicant needing to show intrinsic motivation - especially in an email which could be taken as a screenshot and distributed all over the internet, as this one was.Human resources departmentsare often the first impression a job seeker has of a company. Give a bad impression and your company may get dragged on Twitter.This question could also have been avoided if SkipTheDishes had included more information about the positions salary to signal what kind of applicants they were looking for. A quick line about pay commensurate with experience can go a long way. The CEO himself acknowledged the importance of pay when he said the company does disclose compensation and benefits packages beforehand.When should a job seeker ask about money in an interviewByrnes could have handled this better too. First off, there are better ways of conducting salary negotiations than by email. Salary talks are a crucial part of the discussion for a new job, and talking in person gives candid ates the ability to judge the facial expressions and tone of the executive on the other side of the negotiation.For Byrnes next SkipTheDishes interview, some career coaches advised waiting until the job offer is secured to ask about money.You dont want to be negotiating salary until theyre at their maximum love- their maximum enthusiasm for you, Sarah Stamboulie, a former human resources manager for Morgan Stanley and Nortel Networks said. As a job seeker, you have the fruchtwein leverage when an employer tells you youre their first choice. Thats the momentwhen you press that advantage and ask for the salary you want. There will be a back-and-forth after that, but the goodwill from previous interviews will bolster your case.Nick Corcodilos, a Silicon Valley headhunter, said that above all, if youre asking about salary, do your research about whats an appropriate salary range. It may have helped Byrnes if she had not just asked about salary and benefits, but also justified what added value she could bring to the job - which is, again, a task better left off email.