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The Security Salary Reality

The critical dos, and some definite don'ts, for negotiating a great compensation package.

June 01, 2006 — CSO — Money. Everybody wants more of it. And the time you're in the best position to make more of it—unless you discover a way to start flipping condos in Newport Beach—is when you take a new job.

But negotiating compensation is not for the meek or the egomaniacal. Ask for too little and you'll sell yourself short and feel resentful later; demand too much and you can strain your relationship with your future employer or even lose out on the job. To help you navigate the security salary negotiation terrain, we talked with human resources experts, executive recruiters (who broker salary negotiations) and your peers, and gathered these surefire ways to either make or break the deal.

DO know the ins and outs of how HR approaches "comp."

Every job position in a company has a salary range. People with less experience at a job are placed on the lower end of the scale; people with more experience are placed on the higher end. According to compensation expert Stephen Walker of the Foushee Group, companies base these ranges both on how they value a given job compared to other jobs within the company (called whole job ranking), and on what they have to pay someone based on market value. When you negotiate a salary, you're basically trying to convince the company (or the recruiter who's brokering the deal) that your experience earns you a spot on the higher end of the salary range. It's much harder to convince hiring managers to pay you outside of the range they had planned for. If they do so, they risk introducing pay disparity into the organization. (Imagine having a higher salary than your new boss!)

That said, if the company really wants you, there are ways to get around all this. It's uncommon but not unheard of for hiring managers to rethink the position they want to fill, add greater accountability and bump a candidate up into the next salary range. More common is a sign-on bonus thats intended to entice a candidate to change jobs without introducing pay disparity.

Bonuses, by the way, are not insignificant. Financial services CSOs speak matter of factly of bonuses that are 50 percent to 100 percent of their base salary. Part of the bonus is usually based on the companys performance, and part is tied to whether the individual meets his performance objectives. Experience at putting together "creative" compensation packages is part of the value that recruiters claim to offer. For instance, Joyce Brocaglia, president and CEO of Alta Associates, says she just filled a position at a company that had a salary cap of $150,000. "We knew we couldnt get more money on the base than $150,000, but we were able to negotiate a $30,000 sign-on bonus, a six-month salary review and that 20 percent of the year-end bonus would be guaranteed," she says. The end result? The candidate has guaranteed first-year income of more than $200,000.