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Hi my name's Peter Fiske. I'm the author of Put Your Science to Work: The Take Charge
Career Guide For Scientists. And I'm here at the University of Michigan today to talk
about careers, career development, and strategies for Ph.D.s, so one of the things we talked
about today was the whole concept of negotiation. And it turns out that when people think of
negotiation, they think of negotiation they think of negotiation as this, this kind of
struggle, this battle where you're going to come in high and they're going to come in
low and you're going to kind of beat it out and you're going to end up somewhere in the
middle. But it turns out that the shrewdest negotiators don't look at negotiation from
a conflict standpoint at all. They look at it from the standpoint of solving a problem.
Because if you think about it, in a negotiation, you have a lack of information. Each side
has a set of priorities, but the other side doesn't know what those priorities are. So
the best negotiators tend to ask a lot of questions.So for example, as a job seeker,
once you get that offer, there may be some of the terms that you're... you find very
important, like for example base salary, that's something that's very important to you. It
needs to be a certain number. But some of the factors, in the... in the offer, you might
have a lot of flexibility on, for example when you start. Similarly the employer has
the same terms but a different set of priorities perhaps. Maybe they also have some flexibility
on salary or maybe they don't, but maybe there are other things they're more flexible on.
Maybe, for example, they have an opportunity for professional education that could be negotiated
into your package.So the shrewdest negotiators tend to treat the negotiation process sort
of like diagonalizing a matrix, sort of nerd speak. But basically you have a set of terms
on one axis and the same set of terms on the other axis, and there is an ideal set of agreements
across each of those terms. That's in mathematical terms is what's called diagonalizing a matrix.
In some respects it's the same strategy for coming at the optimal negotiation to, uh,
a hiring package. So think about that when you're talking to employers. Think about ways
in which you can ask them questions. It's perfectly appropriate, for example, to ask,
"Do you have flexibility in the base compensation?" They could say, "no," but they could also
say, "Well, perhaps." But then introducing new terms that could be up for negotiation
is very valuable. One final thing. In going into a negotiation particularly about salary,
make sure that you have your data. So go to salary surveys like salary.com and see if
you can find some baseline data for the company zip code and for the position that you're
applying for. Go in, even into your job interview, with some knowledge as to what the industry
standard is for that job, and you'll have a better sense come negotiation time, uh,
what the right salary is for you. So that's all on that subject.