Forty-Nine Percent of job candidates never negotiate an initial employment offer. Do you?

Are you negotiation-phobic? Are you so risk-averse that in a job interview you blurt out, “Thanks, I’ll take it!” in response to whatever salary you’re offered? If so, you’re not alone. Even though many employers admit to lowballing initial offers in the expectation of a negotiation, many job candidates, it turns out, just grab the first offer.

Not negotiating, however, can be more costly than you think. In their paper “Who Asks and Who Receives in Salary Negotiation,” researchers Michelle Marks and Crystal Harold found that employees who negotiated their salary boosted their annual pay on average of $5,000. According to the researchers, assuming a 5% average annual pay increase over a 40-year career, a 25-year-old who negotiated a starting salary of $55,000 will earn $634,000 more than a non-negotiator who accepted an initial offer of $50,000.

And in a recent study to find out how many people on both sides of the desk do–or don’t–enter into the fray of salary negotiation, CareerBuilder, the largest online job site, found that an astounding 49% of job candidates never even try to negotiate initial job offers. Continue reading “Are you Negotiation Phobic?”