> Salary negotiations are very asymmetrical. Companies know this and routinely exploit it. Job seekers don't, perhaps because they think doing so would be unfair, and the word exploit makes them acutely uncomfortable.
This assertion seems to be a keystone of the article and the way it's positioned, and it doesn't make any logical sense to me. Job seekers don't exploit it because there's nothing to exploit, the whole problem is that the negotiation is asymmetrical, and the asymmetry is rarely in their favor.
I'm also not at all convinced that most any job seeker would refuse to negotiate salary because they feel it would be exploitative or unfair. If the situation was that hundreds of companies were submitting their resumes to me to try to hire me and I got to pare the list down by seeing who was willing to be strung along through an interview process, you'd see me looking like the people in the old NYSE trading floor pictures with multiple phones held up to their ears.
This assertion seems to be a keystone of the article and the way it's positioned, and it doesn't make any logical sense to me. Job seekers don't exploit it because there's nothing to exploit, the whole problem is that the negotiation is asymmetrical, and the asymmetry is rarely in their favor.
I'm also not at all convinced that most any job seeker would refuse to negotiate salary because they feel it would be exploitative or unfair. If the situation was that hundreds of companies were submitting their resumes to me to try to hire me and I got to pare the list down by seeing who was willing to be strung along through an interview process, you'd see me looking like the people in the old NYSE trading floor pictures with multiple phones held up to their ears.