When you’re fresh out of college or early in your career, negotiating your first salary can feel like you’re trying to hit a moving target–blindfolded. First, you don’t have any personal salary history to start from. Second, most companies don’t publish their employees’ salary information. And, third, odds are, none of your college courses covered what you can expect to earn at your first job.
Basically, you have none of the advantages of seasoned workers, but all of the insecurities of a new job seeker.
Don’t sweat it. Use this step-by-step guide to determine how much you should get paid. Follow these moves and you may even squeeze out a slightly higher paycheck than what you expected.
Find Your Baseline
There’s no magic formula that will give you the perfect number, but you can start with online resources. Make sure to look at least three websites, since research methods can vary, says Lewis Lin, author of Five Minutes to a Higher Salary: Over 60 Brilliant Salary Negotiation Scripts for Getting More. Try Payscale.com, Salary.com, and SalaryExpert.com–as well as Monster’s salary calculator. Enter the job title or field and the level you’ll be starting at, and you’ll be given a rough idea.
Also check out the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Occupational Outlook Handbook, which includes median pay estimates for hundreds of jobs. You may need to adjust your salary expectations based on where you live. For example, BLS data shows that a registered nurse in New York earns on average salary of $78,950, compared to $56,980 in Mississippi, which has a lower cost-of-living index.
Talk To The Right People
Online research is a good first step, but the best way to get salary information about a particular company or industry is to go right to the source. That means setting up informational interviews with hiring managers and employees to get a better sense of what entry-level workers get paid.
You want to find out how much junior hires get paid and how hiring managers determine compensation. For example, ask, “Can you help me understand why that’s the salary range?”