People are furious at this recruiter's salary negotiation advice - here's what you should really do

Figuring out the correct way to negotiate your salary is difficult for many. There's a fine line between what is deemed acceptable and what will ultimately be met with immediate rejection.

When one recruiter shared how a recent salary negotiation went down with a prospective candidate, people online were not impressed by the advice she had to offer.

Freelance recruiter Mercedes Johnson posted on her Facebook page that she had recently offered a woman a job for $85,000 even though the company Johnson worked with actually had a budget of $130,000 for the role. “I offered her that because that’s what she asked for and I personally don’t have the bandwidth to give lessons on salary negotiation,” Johnson wrote.

In turn, Johnson had one piece of advice to offer her people on the social media platform. “ALWAYS ASK FOR THE SALARY YOU WANT (DESERVE), no matter how large you think it might be...#beconfident."

Screenshot of Facebook postFacebook

Not only is this objectively bad advice, but it's no wonder many people have flocked to echo support for the Great Resignation. When people are deliberately taken advantage of in a role, it rarely ends well, with many people deciding to leave their job only a few months after they got hired.

Johnson's post was quickly shared all over social media, sparking a very heated debate about what a recruiter's responsibility should be in helping out a candidate who is underselling their salary expectations.

Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter

"capitalism is so far disconnected from reality that Mercedes S. Johnson posted this, thinking that droves of people would applaud her for her selfless actions of *checks notes* offering to egregiously underpay an employee working on salary," wrote one person.

"I’m sorry. I can’t applaud this at all. Every opportunity I have ever had to offer someone more money, I offered," another added, "That might make me a terrible negotiator but I’ll take the L."

"If she wanted to give a 'lesson,' she had an opportunity to give that candidate knowledge that would have taken a mere 5 minutes, since she’s talking about bandwidth. Like, say… 'Listen, you’re undervaluing yourself,' then go from there. Or just tell her what the positions pays!" said another Twitter user.

So what's the correct way to approach this situation? According to HuffPost, hiring experts have argued that candidates do have a responsibility to figure out what the role they want is worth.

Kira Bascombe, a human resources manager at Empowered Diagnostics, told the outlet that salary reporting tools like Glassdoor and PayScale can be used for research, "but she believes 90% of the onus of figuring out the salary range falls on the recruiter, not the candidate because there are so many factors like company size, industry, experience level and location that go into calculating an employee’s salary."

Tejal Wagadia, a recruiter for a major tech company explained to the outlet that candidates should ask recruiters what the budget is for a role during a salary negotiation. “There’s nothing wrong in being like, ‘Hey, could you share what your budget is?’” That way, candidates have a better sense of what their skills are worth to the company and whether they want to take the job.

Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help this story ride through the indy100 rankings and have your say in our news democracy.