After a lengthy hiring process, you really, really, want the candidate to accept your job offer. And why wouldn't you? The cruel irony of staffing is that the recruiting process only happens when you are already overworked and understaffed.

As it turns out, creating the perfect hiring process is fairly difficult. Who knew? For more than ten years, we've been on a quest to bring you the most useful tools for every kind of hiring situation, and for every stage of the hiring process.

Salary negotiations with top performers are a pivotal time in the hiring process. As an employer, it’s easy to forget that the candidate is not yet one of your employees. You can create or destroy trust, and set the tone for your entire employment relationship by how skillfully you negotiate salary. Sadly, salary negotiations are also where hiring managers risk snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Job seekers now have access to credible salary information, so you need to assume they know the market for their skills as well, or better than the hiring manager.

Transparency is vital when discussing how you will compensate and reward top performers. But research shows that the majority of managers do not understand their own organization’s compensation philosophy. (And it’s pretty darn hard to transparently explain something you don’t understand yourself.) This was not a big problem until recently, because managers generally had access to better compensation information than job seekers, so they could wing it.

Those days will soon be over. Credible salary data was once the exclusive province of employers, who paid dearly for it. Now it is available to job seekers at a very reasonable cost.

The CEO called to tell us he was ready to extend a job offer to a COO candidate. "Offer her $185,000, but we have some room to go up from there if she doesn't go for it." His assumption was that the candidate would be comfortable negotiating and would ask for more if she wanted more.

After a lengthy search process, Kathy finally made a job offer. Because every other candidate had already been ruled out, Gerald was the last man standing. Kathy dearly hoped he would accept, she certainly did not want to start all over with the search.

Client emails me and says "Hey, I want to offer the job to Kathy, but I only have her salary on her past two jobs, can you get her salary from the company before that? That would be helpful to arrive at a fair compensation package for both her and us."

I often hear executive recruiters complain about clients with "unrealistic" expectations. I avoid those recruiters because I have no patience for that kind of complaining--it solves nothing.  Executive search firms are strategic advisors to, not victims of, the hiring manager. As search consultants our job is to advise managers of the cost of their choices, and their job is to decide how they would like to proceed. Whining and complaining has no place in that conversation.

Does this sound familiar?  "I can't pay our new manager $110k because the other manager in that department only earns $95k." Hiring managers often hamstring themselves over this kind of "internal equity" consideration. I've written previously about the dangers of hiring to fit the budget, instead of hiring someone with the skills to actually do the job.  This "internal equity" consideration is exactly the same kind of problem.