This Business and Moment...

wingman said:
The next position up in my company is the head of that department, as such there are no current potential ladder climbs as of this moment.

There's an element of unfulfillment for sure, it's offset by the relative level of comfort, and not to mention I'm approached my many people across the business - and quite often - for assistance. It's fulfilling in that respect, but in regards to pushing myself forwards, I can't say I've learned a great deal - certainly not in the last 12 months.

I work in finance, I'm an accountant for a non-financial company (i.e. I work in management accounts rather than in practice, I don't think I could ever work in practice to be honest).

Ha, I had the same response. I feel like a bit of a tool for getting a bonus now as I pushed for it, but at the same time I genuinely just wanted to know why I didn't. I didn't say "I want one", I said "I'd like to know what I could do to secure one going forward". Still, I won't complain.
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I'm in the same sort of role and a similar although specialised niche within the industry I'm in.

If you're truly being paid under market rate with the company not willing to budge then its time to test the market. Follow through on some of these approaches from recruiters and see what is out there. 4 years in the same company earning just incremental increases probably puts you well behind market rate given the experience and exposure you would have picked up in this time. Get a concrete offer through and stick your notice in, if they really value you they'll counter offer, if they don't then you're better off moving on anyway.

Not sure where in the country you are, but this is always a very active time of year for finance roles, everybody gets their bonus and ****** off somewhere new.

I have a conversation with the group financial director tomorrow about my career and where I want to land before the end of the year. I delivered some work last year that was absolutely critical to business survival in an extremely challenging year, my bonus was well below my expectation, and with the extra work I'm taking on in the first 6 months of this year I'm worth a 20% bump. I'm looking to agree in advance that sort of pay rise, assuming I follow through and deliver the objectives laid down by the overall business plan. Although I have significant leverage due to a key man dependency issue meaning the business is utterly reliant on me.
 
Rids said:
I'm in the same sort of role and a similar although specialised niche within the industry I'm in.

If you're truly being paid under market rate with the company not willing to budge then its time to test the market. Follow through on some of these approaches from recruiters and see what is out there. 4 years in the same company earning just incremental increases probably puts you well behind market rate given the experience and exposure you would have picked up in this time. Get a concrete offer through and stick your notice in, if they really value you they'll counter offer, if they don't then you're better off moving on anyway.

Not sure where in the country you are, but this is always a very active time of year for finance roles, everybody gets their bonus and ****** off somewhere new.

I have a conversation with the group financial director tomorrow about my career and where I want to land before the end of the year. I delivered some work last year that was absolutely critical to business survival in an extremely challenging year, my bonus was well below my expectation, and with the extra work I'm taking on in the first 6 months of this year I'm worth a 20% bump. I'm looking to agree in advance that sort of pay rise, assuming I follow through and deliver the objectives laid down by the overall business plan. Although I have significant leverage due to a key man dependency issue meaning the business is utterly reliant on me.
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Thanks for your input, our situation sounds very similar!

Ultimately I think I have got to go through with that. The only time I've ever made big jumps in terms of salary is through finding another job and either negotiating with my current employer, or actually going through with moving on.

I'm based in the West Midlands, and after running a few salary checkers and such I do feel like I'm 20% underpaid - I know getting approached for a role paying £x amount and actually landing it are two very different things, but I'm not exactly a million miles away from where I feel I should be. It's time to put action to the words, I guess. Is it a complete slap in the face to my current company if I take the small increase and bonus, and a month or two later tell them I'm off? Or can I always comfortably fall back on the "at my appraisal I advised I was getting approached for £x salary, and you've concluded that I wasn't worth that?" kind of attitude?

I'd hazard a guess my current company would keep me around, I'm not in as strong a position as you are - by the sounds of it - but not necessarily far behind. There are things going on that I know nobody else in the company is keeping an eye on, and more importantly, I am approached daily for various bits and pieces that simply do not come under my remit. Of course I'm happy to help, but the resolution of some of these queries I feel could not be dealt with by anyone else. Of course, getting the company to recognise this is something entirely different.

Yeah, it does seem active right now, I'm getting a myriad of people contact me on LinkedIn trying to set me up for interviews.
 
EVH said:
Almost every employer I've spoken to asks about salary when they give you an offer, whereas recruiters typically ask about your expectations up-front.

Tip: Always answer with "I can't accept less than x"... be firm, because every employer will try to chip you for few £k. For instance, if they offer £40k and you say "I was hoping for more" they'll offer £43k and eventually £45k if you are willing to push. If you open with "I can't accept less than £47k" then they may try to go in with a £45k offer but you are in a better position to argue it.
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That is kind of backwards as far as advice on negotiating an offer usually goes, generally it is advantageous to you for them to give a figure first (unless you know you're coming in on a higher wage*). It is generally not advantageous for you to be in a position where you have already had to give a figure, whether you frame it as "I'm looking for" or "my total package is worth" or " I can't accept less than" etc.. or you just give them your salary + bonus (which is what they ought to directly ask for individually if they're switched on and want this info without allowing for someone to fudge it a bit with their reply) the act of giving a figure means you're potentially low balling yourself without even realising it which is beneficial for the employer and why they often push for it (or indeed a recruiter pushes for it at the start) before giving you an offer.

Like they were willing to pay up to say 80k and were assuming they'd perhaps be paying between 60 and 80 and say you come in with "I can't accept less than 50k" well they can now make you really happy while also paying you their minimum.

*for example someone working in banking moving to say a big tech firm might need to be put on some special higher compensation scheme if they're already paid above the usual band for that level
 
dowie said:
That is kind of backwards as far as advice on negotiating an offer usually goes, generally it is advantageous to you for them to give a figure first (unless you know you're coming in on a higher wage*). It is generally not advantageous for you to be in a position where you have already had to give a figure, whether you frame it as "I'm looking for" or "my total package is worth" or " I can't accept less than" etc.. or you just give them your salary + bonus (which is what they ought to directly ask for individually if they're switched on and want this info without allowing for someone to fudge it a bit with their reply) the act of giving a figure means you're potentially low balling yourself without even realising it which is beneficial for the employer and why they often push for it (or indeed a recruiter pushes for it at the start) before giving you an offer.

Like they were willing to pay up to say 80k and were assuming they'd perhaps be paying between 60 and 80 and say you come in with "I can't accept less than 50k" well they can now make you really happy while also paying you their minimum.

*for example someone working in banking moving to say a big tech firm might need to be put on some special higher compensation scheme if they're already paid above the usual band for that level
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I've never been in a position where I've had the employer offer a wage first (that wasn't already listed on the advert).

Most of the time I've applied "blind" with only my own expectation of salary and the market average. Obviously, through an agency you can get this up front but with larger employers I tend to find they'll either ask you what you expect or advertise the salary anyway. Like I said... in my experience, if you go in knowing what you want and believe it's the going-rate for the role then you are in a good position.

My point being you should never go in and say "what are you offering?" especially without doing your homework. I stand by my advice that you can always drop a few £k when asking for salary but it's always harder to bump it up.
 
Absolutely negotiate, IIRC the vast majority of hiring managers keep some budget available in order to raise an offer. Asking for more money is a no brainier.

It is seemingly rare to get to the offer stage without having to declare your current salary. Having multiple applications is often useful especially if you can end up with competing offers. In fact just applying for jobs as a matter of course/keeping your CV out there and attending interviews every so often (even if not looking to move no harm in going to an interview each year) just to keep tabs on what you’re worth/see what’s out there etc... can be useful and you never know, you might end up with an offer that makes you want to move jobs anyway.
 
wingman said:
Thanks for your input, our situation sounds very similar!

Ultimately I think I have got to go through with that. The only time I've ever made big jumps in terms of salary is through finding another job and either negotiating with my current employer, or actually going through with moving on.

I'm based in the West Midlands, and after running a few salary checkers and such I do feel like I'm 20% underpaid - I know getting approached for a role paying £x amount and actually landing it are two very different things, but I'm not exactly a million miles away from where I feel I should be. It's time to put action to the words, I guess. Is it a complete slap in the face to my current company if I take the small increase and bonus, and a month or two later tell them I'm off? Or can I always comfortably fall back on the "at my appraisal I advised I was getting approached for £x salary, and you've concluded that I wasn't worth that?" kind of attitude?

I'd hazard a guess my current company would keep me around, I'm not in as strong a position as you are - by the sounds of it - but not necessarily far behind. There are things going on that I know nobody else in the company is keeping an eye on, and more importantly, I am approached daily for various bits and pieces that simply do not come under my remit. Of course I'm happy to help, but the resolution of some of these queries I feel could not be dealt with by anyone else. Of course, getting the company to recognise this is something entirely different.

Yeah, it does seem active right now, I'm getting a myriad of people contact me on LinkedIn trying to set me up for interviews.
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I honestly don't feel like its a slap in the face at all, as long as its done right. I'd go in with the approach of "I've just received a formal offer of £x from Company Y, I appreciate that around appraisal time you did what you could for me in regards to a salary increase, but this is a really interesting role paying x% more than you're able to offer, I just feel its too good to turn down." Any decent manager will understand, you come to work money at the end of the day not for the love of working. Its their job to attempt to save on costs where possible, its your responsibility to look out for yourself - and you're only asking to be paid the going rate. This is the nuclear option though, you need to make sure that the offer you have on the table is one that you are interested in taking, because there is always the chance they may not counter offer you, or offer you terms which are acceptable.

My chat didn't go as well as I hoped, they have career path for me which is extremely interesting and would see me gain great exposure and experience that would be valuable to my progression towards FD - but for me to be released from my current duties to follow that path I need to find a way to back-fill my current role from the existing team. Because of the specialised nature of the role, and the requirement for in depth knowledge that you will not get from working a typical finance role there is nobody in the team that would have the capability to take my current role on - leaving me stuck. As such they couldn't offer anything concrete around development and salary bump by the end of the year, and after such a dissapointing bonus for last years efforts I'm not willing to continue to go over and above for vague assurances of reward - so I'm also going out to the market to see what is out there.
 
Hi all, had the second interview today - feel like it went very well.

The salary chat was nice and easy, I gave them the figure I wanted and explained why I wanted it - seems to be around the market rate for the role and scope.

Should have a decision by end of tomorrow, fingers crossed.
 
JOSH said:
Hi all, had the second interview today - feel like it went very well.

The salary chat was nice and easy, I gave them the figure I wanted and explained why I wanted it - seems to be around the market rate for the role and scope.

Should have a decision by end of tomorrow, fingers crossed.
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Call received, job offered and accepted.

Over the bloody moon!
 
Although I'm focused on VMware, since about 2010 I've wanted to pass my CCNA. I sat my ICND1 in May three years ago and with it expiring soon, I thought I'd give ICND2 a shot and passed it, without revision. :D Only sat it to point me in the right direction and I spent the exam thinking 'no way I'm passing this'. I was pretty surprised to see I had. :D Onto VCIX now.
 
First day at the new job done, blimey - it's gonna take some getting used to going from working in 20-30 employee companies for the last 5 years, to a 1500+ employee company!! On the plus side, it seems that although busier in terms of phone calls and tickets, the new job is much simpler - before where I've done everything from basic level 1 stuff right up to infrastructure/3rd line stuff with group policy, server maintenance/restarting, Citrix VM management, network installations/patching/switches and basically EVERYTHING in between, there's now a team for networking, a team for access management, a team for infrastructure, a team for app support, a team for security... and my team being desktop support only deal with stuff up to a certain level, where it then gets passed to the appropriate team.

So basically, a lot less complexity, less stuff to deal with, for 30% more money. :D I've been used to using 50+ different AD environments/file servers/print servers/exchange servers for the past 5 years - going to a single AD domain etc is just surreal!! :eek::D

One BIG plus of this is that there's a myriad of avenues to go down for progression. I could literally go any one of 5+ different ways, and my manager and me got onto the subject of progression within the first 20 minutes of me being there :D
 
TallPaul_S said:
First day at the new job done, blimey - it's gonna take some getting used to going from working in 20-30 employee companies for the last 5 years, to a 1500+ employee company!! On the plus side, it seems that although busier in terms of phone calls and tickets, the new job is much simpler - before where I've done everything from basic level 1 stuff right up to infrastructure/3rd line stuff with group policy, server maintenance/restarting, Citrix VM management, network installations/patching/switches and basically EVERYTHING in between, there's now a team for networking, a team for access management, a team for infrastructure, a team for app support, a team for security... and my team being desktop support only deal with stuff up to a certain level, where it then gets passed to the appropriate team.

So basically, a lot less complexity, less stuff to deal with, for 30% more money. :D I've been used to using 50+ different AD environments/file servers/print servers/exchange servers for the past 5 years - going to a single AD domain etc is just surreal!! :eek::D

One BIG plus of this is that there's a myriad of avenues to go down for progression. I could literally go any one of 5+ different ways, and my manager and me got onto the subject of progression within the first 20 minutes of me being there :D
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Sound great and what I am hoping to fall into!
 
Yeah seems good so far - good facilities too, I've not had an area I can get away from my desk for lunch for the past year so that's really nice. Might have to make a request/suggestion for some more/better bicycle racks though as the ones there are pretty poor and there's only 4 or 5 of them - parking there is very tight (with 2 overflow car parks) so I'm sure putting more incentive for people to cycle in place can only be a good thing!
 
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I am homeowner :D

Thing was, all morning I wasn't nervous or excited, very neutral, even when in the room signing the ownership over I was the same, paying the fees etc. Then the previous owner had a huge grin and he shook my hand and said congratulations and then suddenly I felt this HUUUGEE wave of "whoa" all over me. Couldn't stop grinning after that :D
 
Not sure if this is the worst ******* April Fools joke in existence... but I awoke this morning to a call from my accountant asking wtf was going on? I had no idea what he was talking about so he told me to go have a look at the recent invoices sent from the landlord we rent our offices from - a large national commercial real estate firm.

Our most recent electricity metre reading said we owed £41 for the month. Surely that means the firm should take £41 from the direct debit right?

Apparently not.

They took £16,000. I **** you not.

I called up and got a muted apology and told to contact the bank for a refund :confused: Then my accountant called and they said they'd refund us by the end of the week... he kicked off and demanded to speak to their FD. They bottled it and issued an immediate credit note.

Still no proper apology.
 
TallPaul_S said:
First day at the new job done, blimey - it's gonna take some getting used to going from working in 20-30 employee companies for the last 5 years, to a 1500+ employee company!! On the plus side, it seems that although busier in terms of phone calls and tickets, the new job is much simpler - before where I've done everything from basic level 1 stuff right up to infrastructure/3rd line stuff with group policy, server maintenance/restarting, Citrix VM management, network installations/patching/switches and basically EVERYTHING in between, there's now a team for networking, a team for access management, a team for infrastructure, a team for app support, a team for security... and my team being desktop support only deal with stuff up to a certain level, where it then gets passed to the appropriate team.
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Sounds like my current company. Only problem.....none of the teams talk to each other. Example, Application Support rolls out a piece of software (without telling anyone!) Following day tickets are assigned to us Desktop Support to fix whatever issues its caused but we cant because we didn't know about the rollout and Application Support should have tested the software before :mad:
 
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