interview prep no. 52
Salary Bands | Gen AI for Different Cultures | Stress Management | Don't Lose Your Audience | Fake Job Postings | Worst-Post-Booking: Delta | Insist on High Standards
This newsletter marks one full year of me writing this newsletter, give or take a few weeks. It has been fun. Thank you for following me and sticking around as I improve it to meet your needs.
This Week’s Highlights
Job Search Salary Bands
Gen AI Customizing ChatGPT for Culture
Interview Anxiety Stress Management
Communication Don’t Lose Your Audience & More
Getting Foot in Door Fake Job Postings
PAID SUBSCRIBERS ONLY
Coach's Mock Improve worst-post-booking experience: Delta
Insider Info Insist on High Standards
Job Search
Negotiation Part 2: Salary Bands
The negotiations continue. My sister’s reaction earlier this week: “This negotiating just seems like a stressful chess game.” And she is right, but I learned a lot.
I am worried the offer will be rescinded, but glad — in the long run — that I stood up for myself. I am a bit frustrated that during my negotiation, at least one of my clients got a better offer than I did from the same company without having to fight for it. I can’t help but wonder if sexism is at play, but it was also likely some anxiety impacting my interview performance. I will never interview again without anti-anxiety meds. Anxiety is costing me hundreds of thousands of dollars this time around, as it has for decades. Next time around, I will not let it get in the way.
This week I learned first hand what happens with salary ranges. The TL;DR for me is the starting offer was at ~85% of the band, which is really designed for new hires and inexperienced employees. I am grossly overqualified to be offered in that range in a good market, but I am a woman, and the market is tough, so they offered me a fraction of what men make with the same experience. I got them to go to roughly 95% of the band, meaning they are willing to pay me as a person with ‘some experience.’ But that is still low compared to most people with my experience at the level I am being hired in at.
In a good market, if I were a man, I would have been offered at the 110% market, but something odd is going on, and I am being offered below my experience level. They can say it was interview performance — but there are other signals that tell me that for most of my panel, I was considered a strong candidate. In today’s market, I might not have a choice. If I had figured out what was going on before I negotiated, I might have possibly used different language. Or at least I would have been more fact-based than gut-based in my reaction to the initial offer.
Working with a friend, we pieced together what must being going on as I had at least one solid figure for the band. We did algebra to figure out the rest. Then I did some research and found an article that explains how most companies think about compensation.
Note: In tech, the requirement to post the salary range is nearly useless since more than 25-50% of most people’s comp is from RSUs and bonus awards.
From USA Today: (I wish I had found this earlier in the process)
A salary range is the range of pay that an employer offers for a particular title or position. Salary ranges often depend on how many years of employee experience, any rare skills they possess and what responsibilities their title requires.
Generally speaking, a role’s compa-ratio should fall between 80% and 120%. Here are the compa-ratios most companies use to determine salary ranges:
80% to 90%: This range is generally applied to new hires or inexperienced employees.
90% to 110%: This range is generally allotted to employees with some experience, some time with the company and who perform well.
110% to 120%: This range is generally assigned to employees with rare skills, a long tenure with the company and/or a lot of experience in the role.
As such, pay policies should center around choosing a pay range of between 80% and 120% of market value for each role. Paying higher or lower salaries than those that fall within this range can lead to suspicion of unfair or inept pay policies by employees or job candidates.
Next time you need to negotiate an offer, I hope this helps you.
Gen AI
Customizing for Culture
In case you missed it, TechCrunch covered how Black product leaders are customizing ChatGPT for Black culture. John Pasmore is working on a Large Language Model (LLM) trained on history and culture of Black and Brown people. Check out his LinkedIn post here. If you have Business Insider (firewall) you can read more about it here.
Pasmore launched Latimer.AI, a language model to give answers tailored to reflect the experiences of Black and brown people. Erin Reddick started ChatBlackGPT, a chatbot also centered on Black and brown communities. Globally there is the Canada-based Spark Plug, which is an alternative to ChatGPT for Black and brown students. Africa is also seeing vast innovation in this space, with language models popping up to cater to the more than 2,000 languages and dialects spoken on the continent that Western AI models still overlook. - Tech Crunch
Interview Anxiety
Stress Management
This week, I am still in a holding pattern. While I wait, I have been exercising about 2+ hrs per day. I also started focusing on sleep and breathe work. As I searched for ways to cope this week, I dove into the following articles:
If you are dealing with stress or anxiety around interviews, take some time out for yourself.
Communication Tip
Don’t Lose Your Audience
Claire Fry shares that we typically lose our audience’s interest in a presentation after 10 minutes. She shared some tips to keep their attention:
Physical Activity
Mental Activity
Introduce Another Voice
Change the Subject
While we can’t use all of these tips in an interview, practicing them at work will help us improve our interview responses.
Don’t forget, if you want to get free time with Claire, try signing up for her Thursday sessions 1-2 pm EST/10-11 am PST.
Getting Your Foot In The Door
Fake Job Postings
This is part of why cold applications can be frustrating and counterproductive. I still apply, but this data is kinda scary. “A new survey found that almost 40% of companies posted a fake job listing this year — and 85% of those companies interviewed candidates for fake jobs”
“approximately 26% [companies] posted one to three fake job listings, 19% posted five, 19% posted 10, 11% posted 50, 10% posted 25, and 13% posted 75 or more.”
Don’t let this scare you from applying, but rather use it to temper your expectations.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to intrico.io | pm interview advice to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.