Dear Boss,
I’ve been applying for jobs for about six months and finally got an offer I was genuinely excited about. The position would be a step up in both title and responsibility, would mean working on interesting projects, and would even let me use a skill I acquired in school but haven’t been able to employ professionally yet.
When they sent me the formal job offer, the salary was a bit more than I’m making now, but I’ve always heard that it’s smart to try to negotiate, and that the hiring process is the best time to do it (versus trying to negotiate a raise down the road). I successfully negotiated slight salary bumps when moving into my last two roles, and have seen others do the same, so it didn’t occur to me that this would be seen as anything other than normal and expected.
So I asked if they had room to go up (by about $8,000, figuring that they might offer half that, which I would have been happy with). There’s a pretty wide range for what jobs like this pay, and my request wasn’t outside of what I’ve seen posted in other job listings. I also didn’t say that I wouldn’t accept unless they agreed, and I don’t think I was pushy about it. What I wrote: “I’m very excited about the position and wonder if you would consider increasing the salary to $X.”
Again, I would have accepted the job even if their answer was no, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to see if they would go up.
The next day they responded that they couldn’t match what I was requesting and so they were pulling the offer. I immediately replied and said that I would accept at the original salary, but the HR person replied that they were going to move forward with another candidate instead.
I’m devastated. I wanted the job, and I would have taken it at the original number they named if they had simply told me that was as high as they could go. I don’t understand what I did wrong.
Oh noooooo, I’m so sorry.
Negotiating salary is a very normal thing to do. Candidates do it all the time, employers aren’t typically surprised by it, and it almost never ends in the offer being pulled.
In fact, it’s so rare that I’m nervous about sharing your letter because I don’t want people who read it to worry that they shouldn’t try to negotiate their salary in the future. Negotiating is nearly always a safe and reasonable thing to do.
When an offer does get yanked because of a negotiation, the explanation is usually one of the following:
1. If they truly pulled the offer because you negotiated and nothing else was at play, that’s so outside the realm of normal business expectations that it indicates they don’t play by professional norms in general. It’s not that negotiations are always successful, but a company that isn’t open to negotiating will normally just tell you that — explaining that their offer is firm and asking if you’d still like to accept it. So a company that responds to a very normal business practice by saying, essentially, “Ugh, now we don’t want to work with you at all” is telling you something about how they operate; they’re the same companies that are likely to have a dysfunctional response to employees who ask for raises or better benefits or who otherwise advocate for themselves. Seen through that light, this is a bullet dodged — although I realize it doesn’t feel that way when you’ve been job searching for so long.
2. Other times, there’s more happening behind the scenes than they’re letting you see, like a stronger candidate emerged at the last minute, or they had a sudden budget crunch and are looking for an excuse to pull the offer. That’s not an okay way to operate — companies should stand by their offers or, if they can’t, they should be truthful about why they’re changing course — but it does happen sometimes.
3. Occasionally, the way a candidate negotiates will give the employer pause. This doesn’t sound like the case with you, but if you come across as notably unenthused, that might make them second guess the offer, especially if they already had concerns about your level of interest. (To be clear, I’m not talking about a neutral response. But if you come across as actively uninterested, they may conclude this isn’t the right match for either of you.) Or if you ask for a salary or benefits that are wildly outside the realm of what’s realistic for the market, they might figure that there’s no practical way to move forward, and also maybe that you’re prohibitively out of touch. The same is true if you appear to be operating in bad faith — like if they were up front about the salary during the hiring process and confirmed with you multiple times that it would work for you, and then you ask for more anyway without offering a reason why (for example, if the responsibilities of the role changed after you last discussed salary).
In your case, my guess is that the explanation is No. 1 or No. 2. It’s certainly worth reflecting on the whole hiring process, and especially the discussion about the offer, to make sure there’s not something about your approach that might have inadvertently set off red flags for a reasonable employer. But assuming that’s not the case, it’s pretty safe to conclude that this was an issue on their side, not yours, and that you did nothing wrong.
As a rule, decent employers do not pull offers because a candidate asked for more money. They might say, “No, the offer is firm,” but at that point it’s generally up to you to decide whether to accept it or not. “Never mind, we won’t offer it to you at all then” is not a normal response, and it’s the mark of an employer that’s highly likely to turn out to be broken in other ways too.
I realize that’s cold comfort when you’re left without an offer for a job you had been excited to accept. But please don’t let it make you apprehensive about negotiating in the future; you’re very unlikely to run into this again, and ultimately you’re better off not working for an employer that reacts harshly to workers who advocate for their own worth.
Find even more career advice from Alison Green on her website, Ask a Manager. Got a question for her? Email [email protected] (and read our submission terms here.)