What Color Is Your Parachute 2018 by Richard N. Bolles copy

esearching, anyway.
On the other hand, if you are going after a larger organization, then you
fall back on a familiar life preserver, namely, every person you know
(family, friend, relative, business, or spiritual acquaintance) and ask them
who they know that might know the company in question, and therefore,
the information you seek. LinkedIn should prove immensely helpful to you
here, in locating such people. If you’re not already on it, get on it (www.​
LinkedIn.​com/​reg/​join).
Maybe this will be easy. Maybe it won’t be: it’s possible you’ll run into
an absolute blank wall at a particular organization (everyone who works
there is pledged to secrecy, and they have shipped all their ex-employees
to Siberia). In that case, seek out information on their nearest competitor
in the same geographic area. For example, let us say you were trying to
find out managerial salaries at Bank X, and that place was proving to be
inscrutable about what they pay their managers. You would then turn to
Bank Y as your research base, to see if the information is easier to come
by, there. And if it is, you can assume the two may be basically similar in
their pay scales, and that what you learned about Bank Y is probably
applicable to Bank X.
Note: In your salary research take note of the fact that most
governmental agencies have civil service positions paralleling those in
private industry—and government job descriptions and pay ranges are
available to the public. Go to the nearest city, county, regional, state, or
federal civil service office, find the job description nearest the kind of job
you are seeking in private industry, and then ask the starting salary.
When this is all done, if you want to be a true expert at this game then
you’re going to have to do a little bit of math, here.
Suppose you guess that the employer’s range for the kind of job you’re
seeking is $36,500 to $47,200. Before you go in for the interview,
anywhere, you figure out an “asking” range for yourself, that you’re going
to use when and if the interview gets to the salary negotiation part. This
asking range is clever, in that it should “hook in” just below that
employer’s maximum, and then go up from there. This diagram shows you
how this works: