Me and my team do very similar things up in the midlands and our lowest paid person will start on £54k and our top paid will be on £80k, those on that top end also have small direct leader responsibilities rather than pure technical though.
Shall i ask for a raise?
- Thread starter Bassmansam
- Start date
^^^ this + should be done with plenty of notice as that gives your manager time to get approval for it etc.
One of my friend's has a method that's quite blunt - there's a recruitment firm in his sector that sends out pay reviews with bounds etc.. for different roles, he forwards it on to his manager each year.
For a significant pay rise in the situation where someone is already below market the constructive way to do it is to take on some additional stuff, be super useful/productive and document it all then flag it up well ahead of ahead of your annual meeting. If someone is way below market there can be internal HR rules capping max pay rise - so with planning you can certainly close the gap but it might take a second year to fully get into market rates.
If you don’t plan ahead then but complain about an annual pay rise after it's already been given then the adjustment available to a manager is likely minor. You basically need a job offer from elsewhere in that case - in many firms that flags things up to HR/senior management and unlocks the ability for your manager to potentially match it if he/she wants to. That option is less ideal if you want to stay in the firm long term but it is probably most effective in the short term as there's less of a dance to do and you can potentially get the whole rise you're after right away.
Ideally you ought to avoid getting into that situation where you're well below market in the first place, be proactive in demonstrating your value and what you expect from an annual rise each year - move firms if you don't get a promotion in 2-3 years, make sure to move anyway after say a few more years (unless the firm is really top tier and constantly throwing money at you) - always negotiate the new offer when moving (the vast majority of hiring managers have more money available to offer you if only you ask for it but the vast majority of candidates simply never bother to ask and just accept the first offer).
Honestly - it's just a case of being proactive, it's not about being the best etc.. obviously don't be a poor or mediocre performer, it's a necessary but not sufficient condition that you be at least competent/good - but given that someone is competent/good then (aside from some outlier amazing people) the distinction between those who earn more and get promoted more isn't that they're better than those who don't, it's just that they were proactive about moving, or asking for a raise or asking for a better offer etc. There are many people out there who aren't proactive, who will just sit there and accept stuff passively - take the first job offer they're given, just do their job and hope that one day someone notices their contribution and chooses to promote them, get a new job and just not bother negotiating again - the cumulative difference between them and someone of the same competency level who did negotiate, was proactive in moving jobs and has leveraged each subsequent salary for a much bigger one with each move can be staggering - you're talking potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds (if not more) left on the table from graduation to being say mid-career and none of it from necessarily working any harder.
Last edited:
IF they can get a replacement. If an employer isn't going to keep up with the market rate staff are going to leave or not stay long. It creates problems, sometimes big problems for them. But we're only paid to carry out work, not actually care.
If you have the experience it's quite easy to jump ship, especially if you also have contacts in the industry. My last 2 roles I only had to put my CV online and they called me within a week. I'm not going to waste time trying to prove my worth by writing some stupid email. In going to stay a year or two, then look for better offers, if they don't beat it I'm gone. I'll take my knowledge and experience to a competitor.
Last edited:
Sometimes it's even worse than that, a place I used to work at had some horrible pay review system that would identify what it considered to be under/overpaid and propose pay adjustments above or below the inflationary rate accordingly. The issue was, HR were very inflexible about deviating from it and the differential between min and max was so tiny that I calculated it could take over a decade to make up even a modest pay gap - 2 years would've been fantastic! The only way I could get half-decent pay rises for the underpaid members of my team was to change their job title. Basically if you had someone good on a low salary you were kinda screwed if they stayed in their role because you couldn't raise their salary enough to retain them long term. If someone is underpaid by say 20%, giving them 3% instead of 2% isn't going to move any mountains.
Last edited: