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@troll I am sure you are right. Despite my “Seriously…” opening to that paragraph, I was still being a bit playful in that response. To be honest I’ve forgotten all the details but there is no way that anyone would have thought that I was doing anything dodgy…because I wasn’t. It was blatantly obvious that I was underpaid and was seeking a new job mainly due to this.
Their opening offer to me, despite my inexperience in negotiating initial starting points, represented a 55% salary hike from my previous, which says it all.Naive mug that I am (at the age of 39 this was actually the first job I was going into “cold”, everything else having been via networking, hence a different approach and zero experience of real interviews etc) I just took it. No salary had been mentioned in the ad and what they offered me was significantly higher than what I was going to use as my STARTING point. So I got lucky maybe (although as more worldly-wise friends predicted at the time, I have not seen a raise after 3 years! But honestly I am still on more than I thought I would be on after 3 years, when I applied in the first place. So hey ho).
But the expectations of the employee’s probation become more onerous. It’s a risky business to promise too much with exaggerated claims.
This is exactly why I accepted my first offer. I did think about demanding more but I decided that the extra scrutiny that I might be under, would not be worth it (and when I worked out the per-day extra take home from what I could reasonably have tried to hike the offer to, it was basically a Pret sandwich per day, hence my view that the extra stress I might put on myself, going into a big shiny corporate in a job with a lot of responsibility already, just wasn’t worth that daily sandwich )
I am comfortable with that decision even if might have hampered future salary raises.
I used to work for a tiny and overstretched company. I applied for a new job and got a first interview (via recruitment agency). When the time came for the recruitment agency to check out my credentials with my then-current employer, they rang up in office hours looking for the HR department (which we didn’t have – HR would have been the MD’s remit). But as the company was small and overstretched, and in an open plan office, if a phone went unanswered for a while it would get redirected to other phones. I heard a phone ringing and it ended up getting redirected to me, and it was the agency checkers saying “we are calling regarding a current employee of yours!”
So I said “ah yes, he’s currently in a meeting with the HR bods you need to speak to, negotiating the terms of a salary raise to retain him”
Except I didn’t, because I was in an open plan office and would not have got away with it.
Seriously with that job application, I said that the new employer can’t just base an offer on my current P45 because of the amount of overtime I was working, which didn’t appear on P45 but which was pretty much relied upon for financial survival. THAT is when you can make up a number, as it is variable and hard to trace.
