These days, phone interviews are an unavoidable part of the job interview process, and for good reason: They save everyone involved time and effort. But that doesn’t mean that phoners require zero energy on the part of the candidate. Yes, you should spend more time preparing for an in-person interview, but many companies treat phone screens as the official first round of the hiring process. That means candidates are expected to go into them prepared with as much information about the company, position, and their own skills and strengths as possible.

We asked HR pros about their top phone interview pet peeves, they had no shortage of advice to offer. Apparently, it’s quite easy to mess up your phone interview. But here’s the thing; it’s also not hard to come across well if you keep some key things in mind.

1. Never Take The Interview Somewhere Noisy
It might seem like common sense, but you’d be surprised what interviewers say they can hear in the background of their phone interviews—everything from barking dogs to screaming children. “Prepare for the interview by securing a quiet space in advance, even if it means escaping to your car parked in the garage,” advises Chere Taylor, founder of Fulcrum HR Consulting. “If you can lock your home office door, by all means, do it. We’ve all been there and sometimes things just happen, but the more time spent anticipating what could go wrong, the better prepared and organized you will appear to the interviewer and the greater likelihood of success.” That doesn’t mean that if your washing machine beeps once in the background all hope is lost, but the more effort you put into being in a quiet place, the more focused you’ll be.

2. Don’t Talk About Your Personal Life
…Unless you’re directly asked a question about what you like to do in your off hours. “The point of a phone interview is to focus on getting to know a candidate’s professional experience and goals,” says Mckenzie Roark, campus talent specialist at Lithko Contracting. “A recruiter is trying to qualify them to see if they are the best fit for a role, and learning about their personal life doesn’t help. For example, when asked where you see yourself in five years, we don’t want to know that you hope to be married or that you want to buy a new house. That is nice but that isn’t relative to anything professional.”

3. Resist The Urge to Multitask
It might be tempting to cross something off your to-do list while on a phone interview, but recruiters and hiring managers can easily tell if your attention is elsewhere. “My number one pet peeve is people who decide to multitask while on the phone interview,” says Dan Krupansky, Talent Acquisition Manager at PrimePay. “I have heard candidates washing dishes, making lunch in the microwave, going for walks, letting their dog out, and grocery shopping during the interview. I even had one person use the bathroom and flush the toilet while speaking with me.” Needless to say, this doesn’t reflect well on your level of interest in the position you’re interviewing for.

4. Skip The Money Conversation
To put it bluntly, it’s simply too early in the process for you to be the one who brings up salary expectations. “Chances are if a candidate is participating in a phone interview, this is the first time they have talked with the company, and the first call isn’t the appropriate time to talk about ‘what’s in it for you,’” says Justina Strnad, the Talent Acquisition Manager for Shiftgig. “Trust me, if you are a great candidate and make it to the next steps, the hiring team is going to be very transparent about what’s in it for you later on!”

5. Never Put Your Interviewer On Hold
Phone interviews don’t take that long, and there probably isn’t anything else going on that is really truly so urgent that you need to pause your interview. “Do not put me on hold to take an important call that just beeped in,” advises Jeremy Payne, head of people operations at Remote Year. “I am your important call. If you are expecting extremely urgent news (like information about a family illness), be sure to preface that in the early minutes of the interview, so the recruiter is aware of the situation and so you can work with them to reschedule if that interruption does occur,” he says.

6. Never Skip The Q&A
“After wrapping up a phone interview, it is typical that the interviewer will ask the candidate if they have any questions. I can’t stress this enough: ALWAYS ask questions,” says Roark. “If we have had a great phone interview and then we wrap up and they don’t have any questions for me, it pretty much ruins the whole interview. It tells me that the candidate is uninterested in the role, which in reality, might not be the case at all,” she notes. But surely, if you’re interested in a job, you can think of something to ask your interviewer.

7. Don’t Be Late
It seems basic, but surprisingly, many people are late to phone interviews. “About a quarter of the people with whom I schedule phone interviews aren’t on time,” says Sophie Cikovsky, who handles the U.S. recruiting for Infinite Global. “While this bothers me personally, it’s also indicative of someone who isn’t very detail-oriented,” she explains. “In order to identify this early in the hiring process, I started asking all candidates a few years ago to call me as opposed to calling them at an agreed-upon time. That way if I hear from them at 1:13 pm or 12:49 pm instead of our planned 1:00 pm interview time, I have an early indicator that they might not be a great fit.”

8. Don’t Assume Reception Is Good
“Make sure you test your headset and connection before dialing in,” recommends Payne. “There is nothing more frustrating for a recruiter who has a structured interview guide in place having to repeatedly ask the same question over and over because they could not understand your answer due to static or dropped signals.” Test call a friend beforehand or even call yourself from a landline if necessary; it will take less than a minute.

9. Never Talk Over The Interviewer
You might be eager to get your point across or talk about your experience, but interrupting the interviewer is awkward and rude when you’re speaking on the phone, even more so than in face-to-face interviews. “Interviewing can be stressful and sometimes that stress manifests itself in speaking too fast, speaking too loud, talking over the interviewer, or attempting to answer the interviewer’s question before they have actually finished asking the question,” says Taylor. “Don’t do this.” There’s a big difference between being assertive and being aggressive, and interviewers can always recognize it.

10. Skip Filler Words
It’s tough not to say things like “um,” “uh,” and “like” in everyday speech, but these verbal habits become much more pronounced when speaking on the phone, says Chris Dardis, a recruiting expert and HR professional with Versique Executive Search. “In face-to-face interviews, they’re not as noticeable because there are other things like your hair, suit, or body language to distract people,” he explains. But in a phone interview, the only thing you have to go on is what you say and how you say it. “That’s why it’s so important to eliminate these words from your speech when doing a phone interview.”

11. Don’t Go In Blind
Not knowing anything about the company or job you’re interviewing for is way more obvious than you’d think. “Many people think that a phone interview means they’re getting away with something, that they don’t have to put as much effort into researching the role or company,” says Steve Pritchard, HR Consultant for giffgaff. And if you have your laptop in front of you during the interview to do a few quick searches, they won’t know the difference, right? Not exactly. “Seasoned interviewers will know whether an interviewee is researching while on the phone; they will take too long to answer the question and punctuate their answers with a lot of ‘ums’ and ‘errs’ as they type. The interviewer can often even hear the typing as they ask the question,” he adds.

12. Nix Long-Winded Answers
“The key to success during a phone interview is clear and concise answers,” says Dardis. “People’s attention spans tend to be shorter over the phone. You don’t want your future employer to lose interest in the conversation.” He recommends practicing answers to questions you know will be asked ahead of time in order to be clear on what you’re going to say. That way, you can prevent rambling before it starts.

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When you sit down for a job interview, it’s perfectly natural to want to know how you’ll be compensated now and in the future. After all, the average job candidate in the United States stays in the job for which they were hired for about four years. After that, it’s time to move up or move on.

But how do you ask about promotions in an interview without making it look like you’re going to move on quickly? Or without coming across like you think you deserve a better job right from the start?

It can be an uncomfortable conversation, but there’s no opting out. In order to choose the opportunity that best fits your career plans, you need to have accurate information about the position. That conversation must involve a glimpse of what promotions and raises might look like if you were to accept a job offer.

Here are three effective questions to help you ask about promotions in an interview without looking presumptuous:

1. Ask, “How do you help good performers grow in this position?”

Companies attract competitive candidates by offering growth opportunities. It’s very likely that the company you’re interviewing with will want to highlight its efforts to help employees grow and evolve through professional development, education, or experience opportunities.

Since “growth” can be a codeword for future promotions, asking this question will give the interviewer an opportunity to talk about people who started out in this position and grew into promotions or raises. If they don’t bring it up, follow up by specifically asking if anyone within the company got started in a similar position.

2. Ask, “Can you tell me how you’d compensate the person in this position if they went above and beyond your expectations?

Start by asking the interviewer to identify what achievements would indicate success in the position. Not only will this give you an idea of what kind of work you’ll be focusing on, but it will also show the interviewer that you understand that each position is part of a bigger picture.

Then, ask what happens if an employee completes all of those milestones and then achieves even more. If it’s a good opportunity, that will naturally lead to a conversation about the company’s compensation structure, including promotions and raises.

3. Say, “Your company culture values X. Can you tell me how that plays out in compensating and promoting employees within your organization?”

Because company culture influences the work you do and how you do it, it also impacts future earnings. Therefore, be on the lookout for culture fit when you interview for a new job. For example, if you’re really good at specialized, individual work, but you’re interviewing with a company that values teamwork above all else, there might be a fundamental mismatch. if the company flat-out says it values one skill over another, it’s not going to invest promotions and raises in someone with those unvalued skills.

As you learn more about the company, ask follow-up questions to see how the company’s culture impacts compensation and promotion. This question, in particular, will give the interviewer a chance to share examples of skills they value and how they have compensated and promoted individuals with those skills in the past.

Don’t shy away from a conversation about promotions and raises in an interview. It’s important information you need to be able to make an informed decision. But remember: no matter how strategically you ask about promotions in an interview, no promotion is guaranteed. Once you get the job, use these tips to set yourself up to get those promotions.

The post Is It Presumptive to Ask About Raises In a Job Interview? appeared first on Résumé Writing and Career Services.

From an employer’s perspective, bonuses are often preferable to raises because they’re generally a self-limiting cost. A company can give out bonuses when it has a year of strong sales, and halt that practice during a year in which sales drop. Raises, by contrast, are generally riskier, because once workers get a boost, companies are essentially locked into paying them more for as long as they remain employed.

Even if a given business decides not to give raises in future years, that business is still required to keep up with preexisting salaries. Furthermore, because certain benefits, like 401(k) matching dollars, are often tied directly to salary, increasing set compensation can cost companies in other ways. But while bonuses may be the safer bet for employers, that doesn’t necessarily hold true from a worker’s perspective. And though you’re better off getting a bonus this year than receiving no boost in compensation whatsoever, here are a few reasons you, as an employee, should push for a raise over a bonus.

1. It Could Pave the Way to a Better Salary in the Future
Have you ever been asked, whether during a phone screen or in-person job interview, how much you’re earning or earned in a given role? It’s a question that’s posed all the time*, but when you answer it, you’re supposed to simply talk salary, because bonuses don’t count. Now, imagine you’re planning to apply for a new job next year and currently earn $60,000. If your company decides to boost your salary by $3,000, you’ll get to tell your next company that you’ve been earning $63,000. But if your company hands out that $3,000 in the form of a bonus instead, that extra money won’t help for the purpose of that conversation.

One thing you must understand about salary is that the amount you make today will most likely dictate what you’re able to command in the future. If you let yourself remain content with a bonus in the absence of a much-deserved raise, you could end up limiting your earning potential for the remainder of your career. *Editor’s note: Depending on where you live, this question may be illegal — learn more here. 

2. You May Be More Inclined to Use That Extra Cash Responsibly
We’re all told we’re supposed to save a percentage of our salaries, whether for emergencies or the future. But the so-called rules surrounding bonuses are less clear-cut. After all, if that cash is really extra money, shouldn’t you get to use it for fun purposes rather than feel compelled to save it? Now here’s the thing: If your finances aren’t great, then the answer is a resounding “no.” No, you shouldn’t blow your bonus money on a fancy gadget or vacation if you’re behind on savings. And incidentally, most Americans are.

An estimated 57 percent of U.S. adults have less than $1,000 in the bank, while 39 percent have no near-term savings to show for at all. Most of us aren’t doing too great in terms of retirement savings, either. Households between the ages of 44 to 49 have just $81,347 stashed away for retirement, on average, while those between 50 and 55 have an average savings of $124,831. And while those numbers are far from impressive, what’s even worse is that nearly half of U.S. households have no retirement savings at all. All of this boils down to the following: If you get a salary boost, you’re more likely to use that money responsibly than if it were to come in the form of a bonus. And that’s the sort of pressure most working Americans need.

3. Bonuses Are Taxed Less Favorably
When you earn money as a salaried employee, you eventually get used to losing a certain portion of your paycheck to taxes. Bonuses, however, are taxed differently. In most cases, you’ll lose 25 percent of your bonus right off the bat because that payment will be considered supplemental, and therefore subject to a higher tax rate. But that 25 percent doesn’t account for Social Security and Medicare taxes, not to mention state taxes. Therefore, by the time you receive that check, you may come to find that your bonus has been whittled down to something in the ballpark of 60 percent of its original figure. And while you may receive some of that back when you file your tax return, it means you could end up waiting a year or more to get that missing money.

Obviously, if given the choice between a bonus or nothing this year, it would be prudent to opt for the former. But if you have a good relationship with your employer, it pays to make the case for giving out raises instead of bonuses if the option for both isn’t on the table. It’s a move that could end up paying off not just at present, but many, many years down the line.

This article was originally published on The Motley Fool. It is reprinted with permission.

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Employee compensation can be an emotional subject, especially if you’re the employee. It is often daintily tiptoed around in interviews and loudly complained about in bars. Personally, I’m a firm believer that compensation is a reflection of an employee’s value to a company. As the value goes up, so does pay. When I express these opinions, however, I often get disgruntled rebuttals like “Yeah, right. Corporations have no concept of loyalty,” “Layoffs are completely arbitrary—it doesn’t matter what you’re worth,” and “The only way to get a raise is to change jobs!” Since these complaints are made to me—the CEO of a company that clearly isn’t so callous—it’s obvious that these stereotypes cannot be universal.

Putting aside this irony, though, even if every company in the world were as ruthless and coldblooded as some believe, value and compensation would still be inextricably connected.

Let’s take a look at why this is the case and how you can increase your value as an employee to get paid what you deserve.

What Happens Behind Closed Doors… Let’s be a fly on the wall in that dim, coffin-shaped room where lanky, black-suited business misers drum their spindly fingers together and cackle over that most evil of subjects: layoffs. When they discuss the customer support floor, they decide they need to lay off one person, and gradually narrow the options down to two employees:

Option 1: “Bill” is an old-and-true company standby. He’s worked at the company for 20 years and has been completely faithful to his job expectations. He clocks in and out on time and delivers his customer support perfectly on script. As a result, he’s accumulated a number of raises over the years and now makes $20 an hour.

Option 2: “Shelly” has only worked in customer support for 5 years but has obtained advanced technical certifications, has an excellent interpersonal manner, and routinely turns upset customers into loyal patrons. Clients who get support from her are 30% more likely to purchase additional services and to refer friends. She talks off script a fair amount but keeps track of what she says and how customers react. As a result, she has submitted many helpful modifications to the basic IT script, resulting in a 10% increase in customer satisfaction for the whole floor.

Due to her high performance, Shelly also makes $20 per hour. Which one gets the boot? It’s Bill without question. The company is actually losing money on Bill. If they fired him, a new employee would work for only $12/hour and could read the script just as skillfully as him within 2 weeks. If Shelly were fired, however, the company would lose out on a major source of sales, referrals, customer satisfaction, and an internal system for improving the whole department—they can’t afford to lose her!

Value is Not the Same Thing as “Years on the Job” But what about faithful old Bill? It would be so mean to fire him! Bill’s problem is that he hasn’t really done anything to justify his increased wages. Small raises have accumulated on his paycheck like moss on an old river rock, but his real value is still around $12 an hour. However, since Bill has been working at the company for so many years, he probably “feels” like he’s worth $20 an hour. Never mind the fact that he couldn’t get paid $20 an hour at a different company, he’s “put in his time,” so he’s worth $20 an hour, right? Now, I’m not trying to understate the value of experience and wisdom.

Good employees learn and grow over time, so they provide more value for their employer. As a reward, they get raises. The problem is, that those raises are often based on meeting minimum standards for specified periods of time—not the value an employee brings to the table. As a result—when push comes to shove and a company needs to actually evaluate the worth of an employee— “years on the job” mean far less to the business than added value.

Businesses Pay for Value To be honest, many employees are confused about what their salaries pay for. When people first enter the workforce as teenagers, they usually start with an hourly wage. The equation is simple: The more you work, the more money you get. Unfortunately, after a couple of years, many people begin to translate time into money and begin to think, “I’ve put in a lot of time at this job, so it stands to reason that I should be making a lot of money! I need a raise!” Allow me to burst that bubble. Value isn’t a function of time. There are 24 hours in a day whether a company pays for them or not—it’s what you do with those hours that counts.

Employees are Business Assets Even for hourly employees; businesses aren’t paying for time—they’re paying for value. To put it simply, an employee is a company asset and compensation is an investment in that asset. Let me explain what I mean. If I were to invest $5,000 in a new asset for my business—say an online marketing account—you might think that it would have to make $5000 in sales to justify the expense.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work that way. I won’t get too deep into the math of contribution margin, but in short, since my business expenses aren’t just limited to what I spend on marketing, it turns out that the account would have to make me at least 3 times my investment ($15,000) just to break even. If the asset started producing 4 or 5 times more money than I put into it, then it would really be profitable. In fact, I’d be willing to invest more if I knew my payoff would be that good. The same goes for employees.

If I’m going to invest in people, I need to know that having them around will make my company at least 3 what I’m paying them. The more revenue an employee drives for my business, the greater their value and the more I’m happy to pay to have them as an asset. An employee who produces less value, however, loses me money, and—unless they can become more productive—I can’t afford to keep them in the long run.

How to Increase Your Value Now, I think we’ve looked at things like a ruthless businessman for long enough to show why companies care about the value their employees bring to the table. In most real businesses with real, warmhearted people (like I try to be), the same principles are still at play, but the focus is more on encouraging employees to become more valuable than on eliminating dead weight.

In general, this encouragement comes in the form of salary. The more value an employee brings to the table, the more they deserve to be paid. The question then becomes, how do employees increase their value? There are three basic steps: 1) ensure that you’re meeting the basic expectations of your job, 2) you identify areas where you can add more value, and 3) create and execute a plan to exceed expectations!

Step 1: Meeting Expectations Before you start trying to expand your horizons, it’s a good idea to make sure that you’re at least fulfilling the minimum requirements of your role. Of course, it can sometimes be hard to figure out what those requirements are. A recent Gallup poll revealed that up to half of employees don’t really understand what is expected of them at work. Many companies have very little in the way of formal job descriptions.

Others have long lists of tasks and expectations around hiring time, but when you start the job, you find that half the stuff on the list you never do and half the stuff you do isn’t on the list. So, if you’re not what your job expectations really are, the easiest way to get that question answered is to talk to your manager. Have a discussion about what workplace success looks like. You might even ask how your position adds value to the company. This gives you a target for increasing your value later on. If in this discussion, you discover work expectations that you weren’t aware of or that you haven’t been meeting, your first priority should be to start meeting those expectations.

As Gallup’s poll also suggests, you may also find that some managers are just as confused about your role as you are. If this describes your supervisors, then a sit-down conversation is especially important. Defining together what your core responsibilities are will help them to know when you are exceeding expectations.

Step 2: Find Areas to Excel As part of your conversation, you should also determine a list of projects which could add extra value to the company that falls within the scope of your job. It’s important to choose these projects in conjunction with your manager because you need to be sure that when you go above and beyond, it’s in areas that your company finds important. What’s more, you want your extra efforts to be recognized for what they are. It’s helpful at this stage to come up with a way to document your performance. Remember Shelly—how she increased customer satisfaction by 10% and got 30% more referrals than average? These numbers make her value pretty undeniable, but they wouldn’t exist if she or her managers weren’t keeping track of them. If you work in an area like sales, it’s pretty easy to document your performance with hard figures, but for many other jobs, performance is less easy to quantify. Documentation is still important in these cases, but it may look a little different.

Step 3: Make a Plan and Execute It Finally, you need to put everything you’ve learned into action. If your goal is to increase your compensation at work, you can start by deciding how much more you would like to be making. Take your current job expectations and salary as the baseline for what you’re worth to the company. Then realize that for every $1 you hope to get in increased pay, you need to bring in $3-5 to the business for your raise to make sense. Pick from your “above and beyond” list some projects that would add this kind of value to the company. Make a plan to complete these goals in addition to your regular tasks and present the plan to your manager. Trust me, this will go over A LOT better than the old, “I’m getting married so I need a raise” conversation. Your manager may not agree with every detail of your plan, but you will definitely come off as a motivated employee who really gets it. And, even if your managers don’t buy in right away, it will be a great opportunity to discuss their priorities again and work together to come up with a plan that accomplishes things that really matter.

Don’t skip this important conversation. I’d hate to get a comment on this article saying, “I wasted six months doing what you said only to find out that nobody cared about my contribution.” If you haven’t figured it out by now, communication with your superiors is going to be a critical part of this whole process. Unfortunately, business plans are rarely static and you may have to chase a moving target, but if you’re willing to be flexible, you should be able to keep moving forward toward your goals.

Reaching Your Goals Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “This all sounds great, Jacob, but it also sounds a little too ideal. It would never work at my business.” Maybe not. I can’t predict every circumstance and there’s a chance that yours is an exception. But isn’t it worth a try? The relationship between employee value and compensation holds just as true in “big ruthless corporations” as it does in more supportive ones.

For example, one of my employees recently related to me his experience at a prior company. This was one of those stingier jobs and had a high turnover rate for entry-level employees. However, he applied the principles I’ve described. He developed a number of specialized skills and got deeply involved in some really important projects. The miserly company was happy to be getting more out of him for the same pay…until the day he started looking at taking his skills elsewhere. His value was so great by then that the company would be set back months or years if he left, so when he suggested that he would need a 40% pay increase to stay, they felt like it was a worthwhile investment.

Despite the money-grubbing attitude of this company, he was providing so much value that he had become an asset they couldn’t afford to lose. As a result, he was able to negotiate a much better situation for himself.

Conclusion The moral of the story? If you feel that you deserve a raise, don’t get drunk and holler about it every Friday night. Take inventory of your worth, talk with your managers and start working to become a more valuable asset. Jacob Baadsgaard is the Founder & CEO of Disruptive Advertising and a passionate entrepreneur on a mission to help businesses achieve online marketing success. 

The post A CEO Reveals How to Increase Your Value as an Employee appeared first on Résumé Writing and Career Services.

A Guide to Determining Whether a Job Offer is Right for You
After a long and arduous job search, you’ve finally received an offer. Congratulations! While your first impulse may be to immediately accept the job (we all know the feeling of never wanting to write another cover letter again!), wait for a second. Is this job really the perfect fit for you?

“The number one misstep I see clients take is the failure to step back, take a breath, and meaningfully assess a job offer,” says Karen Elizaga, executive coach and author of Find Your Sweet Spot to Glassdoor. “They are almost inclined to jump immediately at an offer.”

This guide was designed to walk you through meaningfully assessing the job offer you’ve received. We’ll take you through what questions should you be asking yourself about the job, how to do in-depth research on the job offer, and finally, how to negotiate your way to an offer you feel satisfied with.

What is a job offer?
After submitting your resume, cover letter, and coming in for interviews, you’ve finally been offered a job. You’ll probably have a chat with the hiring manager or recruiter, have an offer letter sent to you, and be able to take a look at the contract. But this doesn’t mean the terms of the offer are final yet. It’s now up to you to carefully evaluate the information you’ve been given, decide if it’s right for you, and negotiate your way to an optimal offer.

How to ask the right questions
During the job search process, you only have so much time to thoroughly research every company. Now that the real possibility of working somewhere is on the table, it’s time to take a thorough dive into assessing if it’s a good fit. This starts with asking yourself the big questions about whether the job is truly right for you.

“I have seen clients take a job where the fit—in the context of their skills and talents with the job—was excellent. But in the end, these jobs didn’t work out because the company’s culture did not jive with their own moral compass,” Elizaga says.

Questions you might consider include: Are the day-to-day responsibilities of the job waking up excited every morning to do? Does the company itself have a strong future, or has it been performing poorly in recent years? During my interview and visit to the company, did I feel like the company’s atmosphere and culture were conducive to my style? What will my opportunities for growth in this role be? Am I okay with the length of commute and expected working hours each week?

You might also find that during the course of asking yourself these questions, you don’t have enough information to answer some of them. These are the questions that you should reach out to the company, or do your own independent research on, to clarify.

Beyond these detailed questions, it’s important to just check in with yourself and feel what your gut is telling you about the job. “While data is important, you also want to trust your gut,” said Mikaela Kiner, an executive career coach and CEO of uniquelyHR, to Glassdoor.
“During your interviews, were you hopeful things would work out? Or, would you have been relieved if they chose someone else? Don’t dismiss concerns, even if they were just fleeting thoughts,” she added.

How to do your research
Now that you have a clearer picture of what’s important to you in the job hunt – and where you still need information – it’s time to do some digging. Here are some avenues of research that will help you get the information you need to make an informed decision:

• Scour the contract and offer letter

The first place you want to get information from is the contract and/or the offer letter. These can give you highly important details like whether there’s a minimum amount of time you must stay at the job, how far in advance you need to notify the company before quitting, and how many days of vacation and sick leave you’ll get each year.

• Speak to people at the company

If there are any points you can’t determine from your independent research, the company itself is the next place to start. Often, the company will be more than happy (and even encourage you) to arrange for you to speak with current employees. This call is an opportunity for you to get a sense of the company’s culture, and if what you saw in the job description actually matches reality. When the job description said 40-hour workweek, is that really true, or will you often be expected to stay late? How are meetings run at the company? Are there annual performance reviews? Does the company’s upper management regularly interact with employees? Ask the right questions, and you’ll receive a wealth of important information about culture and fit.

• Read online reviews

After your conversation with one person at the company, they might have you either convinced it’s a sparkling utopia, or that you should be running away from the company at top speed. Every person has their own unique experience in the workplace. That’s why it can be so helpful to gain a broader perspective by reading online reviews of employees’ experiences, like through Glassdoor’s company reviews.

• Check the benefits

While the salary might not be exactly your target, it’s important to evaluate it in the context of the benefits offered. “It may be that the salary is $5,000 lower than you had hoped for, but the full package being offered counterbalances it,” said Carisa Miklusak, CEO of tilr, an automated recruiting platform, to Glassdoor. “What does the total package contribute to your personal and financial needs? Sometimes, a job that at first glance looks like it’s paying less can actually provide more financial security than a job with a higher salary.” Also keep in mind the benefits and perks that aren’t written in the offer letter or contract, but are available to every employee. Take Uline for example, whose corporate headquarters has a salon, a 24-hour fitness center, walking trails, ponds, a mother’s room for women nursing – just to name a few of the benefits. Or consider Power Home Remodeling, which spends millions of dollars to bring its entire staff to Mexico each year. Check the company’s website and Glassdoor benefits – the extra perks might just make the job worth it.

• Calculate whether the salary matches what you should be paid for your level of experience and education.

As a starting point for your salary negotiations, it’s important to frame what your target is. A helpful tool for this is Glassdoor’s Know Your Worth™ tool, which calculates the salary you should reasonably expect in today’s active U.S. job market based on your experience and other personal details. For many companies, you can also find on Glassdoor the salary range of people in the same position at that company.

How to determine your non-negotiables
Now that you’ve done your research (and your research hasn’t deterred you yet from taking the job!) you have a solid foundation to go into negotiations with. What’s left? Prioritizing what you can compromise on, and what’s a deal-breaker.

For all the criteria you’ve identified as valuable to you during your questioning and research process – such as salary, commute length, ability to work from home, or opportunities for international travel – make a list of them in varying order of importance. Are there any you simply can’t do without? Are there some you’re willing to compromise on? If so, how much are you willing to compromise? This exercise will help you set the bottom line for your negotiations, and delve deeper into whether this position is really a good fit for your career goals.

Even better, you can proactively start this list before you even start the job search. “I recommend my clients make a list of what they are looking for even before they begin searching for a job,” said Amy M. Gardner, Certified Professional Coach with Apochromatik, to Glassdoor. “If you’ve done that, go back to the list you created and evaluate the offer against the factors you initially listed.”

How to negotiate the final terms of the offer
You’ve done your research and determined your priorities. It’s time to step into the negotiation process. It’s possible that you’ll conduct the negotiation in person or over the phone, or that you’ll simply write out negotiation points via an email. So how to negotiate? Here are four easy steps to negotiate your final offer based on Glassdoor’s How to Get a Job toolkit.

1. Do your research. Back up whatever you’re asking for – usually it’s a higher salary, but it could also be a better benefits package – with solid facts and statistics. Glassdoor’s Know Your Worth tool can also help you ground your salary ask in an appropriate range.
2. Know what’s on the table. Keep in mind the entire benefits package in your negotiation (as well as enticing perks the company offers to everyone) and remember that you can negotiate benefits, too.
3. Ask, don’t demand. Remember that the company does want you – they offered you the job, after all – so you have the cards stacked in your favor. Use language that shows you’re on the same team as the hiring manager to start off negotiations, like “can we talk about which benefits are negotiable?” and “what are the prospects for salary raises and promotions in this position?”
4. Know your breaking point. Think back to the list of priorities you made. Be aware that it’s unlikely you get everything you ask for in a negotiation. At the same time, if the highest salary and benefits package that they can give you is still below your target, it might be time to walk away.

Once you’ve gotten your final offer from the company, you make a final assessment of whether it meets your criteria and priorities. If it doesn’t, at least you’ll now have a clearer sense of what you’re really looking for in your job hunt. If it does, congratulations! You got the job and the salary that you wanted.

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If you’re an avid (read: addicted) multitasker and flipping between tasks even as you read this, you might want to put down the Twitter feed for a sec. Because while you may think you’re really good at it, there’s scant proof of that. Just ask science. Because there’s mounting evidence that multitasking does just the opposite — not only makes you less effective, but could quite possibly make you more depressed.

I know this. I do. And yet I feel pulled, as you do, in a thousand directions at once, every day, all the time. No matter what I read or watch I feel I should be doing something else. It’s the blight of the modern professional. We have more competing for our attention than ever, and the seduction of “do everything at once” will cost us.

To come to terms with our multitasking addiction, we have to face up to some of the lies we tell ourselves to defend it. Here are some of the biggest lies you and I tell ourselves about multitasking, exposed to the cold light of scientific research.

LIE: I’m really good at it.

TRUTH: No one is.

Multitasking isn’t like tennis or learning French; you don’t get better the more you do it. Your brain isn’t designed to focus on more than one thing at a time, and an attempt to do so results in splintered focus, and, according to this interesting research out of Stanford University, cognitive damage. (Travis Bradberry did a nice distillation of the study on Forbes.)

In it, researchers looked at how heavy multitaskers (people who regularly do a lot of media multitasking) fared against light multitaskers (those who don’t do it regularly). And the heavy multitaskers came up short every time. When test subjects were shown letter and numbers and told what to focus on (say, a number and whether it was even or odd, or a letter and whether it was a vowel or consonant), the heavy multitaskers underperformed. One of the researchers explains that it’s because they couldn’t ignore what they were told to ignore, and paid attention to everything at once.

LIE: It makes me more productive!

TRUTH: It makes you less effective.

When you flip from window to window and task to task during the day, you may feel you’re working faster, but what you’re doing is switching a lot, but that doesn’t make you effective. Chances are that what makes you good at your job is your ability to make good decisions. And while this particular study didn’t measure decision-making, it did consider the participants’ ability to prioritize. One of the key findings of the study is that heavy multitaskers showed a marked inability to focus on one thing or, more interestingly, prioritize. Communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says that heavy multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy” because “everything distracts them.”

An inability to filter information means an inability to effectively prioritize. And if you can’t prioritize well, you can’t make good decisions. I’ll add this: When the researchers tested a theory that perhaps heavy multitaskers had better memory function which allowed them to organize information? That theory did not pan out. In fact, multitaskers fared worse in the memory department.

If you can’t remember what you were doing a minute ago, let alone what you have to do next or later, and a compromised ability to know what’s worth paying attention to, you’re going to have some real problems getting things done, let alone getting ahead.

LIE: It’s fun!

TRUTH: It’s the destroyer of fun.

There are some kinds of multitasking that are utterly benign: folding laundry while watching Law & Order: SVU. Doing some light administrative work (or toilet scrubbing) while listening to Serial. One of the reasons why we think we enjoy multitasking may be at least partially explained by this study published in Computers In Human Behavior, in which researchers found that it gives the sense that time is passing more quickly (which feeds the sensation that you’re “getting things done”). (Read more on why busywork makes you happy.)

But I’m far more disturbed by this study, published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, in which researchers found an association between media multitasking and psychosocial dysfunction, suggests that “the growing trend of multitasking with media may represent a unique risk factor for mental health problems related to mood and anxiety.” Yikes.

I discovered this myself when recently I decided that one of my favorite shows wasn’t good anymore. It felt tedious, plodding, and not compelling. But then I looked at what I was doing differently: I had started to catch up on admin stuff while watching it. It wasn’t the show’s fault at all — my splintered attention had sucked all the fun out of that one hour of TV I was saving for myself that night.

Multitasking doesn’t give you or me a leg up on anything. But only when we can shift our cultural perception of productivity to focused over fast, we won’t be able to do or think or even fully live the way we most wish we could.

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Nervous about asking for a raise? Follow this advice from career experts, and you might just get what you want.

1. They negotiate from the start.

“How well you negotiate at the beginning sets you up for how well your salary flows in the future,” says HR consultant Laurie Ruettiman, author of I Am HR: 5 Strategic Ways to Break Stereotypes and Reclaim HR. When asked about your salary expectations, respond by asking what the new job will pay, instead of presenting your personal salary history. “If you follow prescriptive advice and you never take a risk, especially during salary negotiations, you don’t earn a reward,” says Ruettiman.

Another tactic she recommends is asking for the “best first offer” (the maximum that they’re able to give) when discussing compensation for a new job, because it presents the assumption that you won’t need to negotiate a higher salary.

2. They do their research.

“When women do not do their research, they typically undervalue themselves at 30 percent,” says Sarah Laschever co-author of Women Don’t Ask and Ask For It || Amazon.com}}, and the Academic Coordinator for the WIN Summit. Sites like Glass Door and Salary.com will help you get a sense of the market and how your current salary compares.

3. They activate their networks.

Your connections can offer even more valuable information than a website. Money can be difficult to talk about, but if you simply ask for salary ranges, you’ll have a better sense of what you should be asking for in your meeting, says Kathleen Harris, VP Content Development at Levo. Additionally, expand your network from just your coworkers (it might be less awkward, anyway). Ask old classmates or people in your alumni network for guidance and insight, says Laschever.

4. They understand that timing is everything.

“It’s very difficult to negotiate your salary off of the performance management cycle,” Ruettiman says. This means you should typically wait until review time to bring up the conversation, because that’s when employers and companies are most prepared to discuss compensation. However, it’s smart to preempt the conversation by checking in with your boss a month ahead of time for an “impromptu performance review,” says Harris, so that you can assess your strengths and weaknesses, and how you can improve and grow in your position.

5. They give their bosses time to prepare.

“The surprise factor is never good,” says Harris. Make sure you give your employer notice that you want to discuss compensation. You don’t need to explicitly call it a meeting about salary negotiation—just asking to discuss your role in the company will tip your boss off that you will likely talk money.

6. They practice their speech.

Whether you outline it beforehand, read it in a mirror, or practice with a friend, make sure you’re comfortable with your talking points. Laschever recommends asking a friend to role play the conversation, because he or she can offer feedback on your speech and body language—you might not realize that you tend to shake your leg, tap your fingers on the desk, or gaze off into the distance when you’re thinking about a question.

7. They walk into the room with a positive attitude.

“Cheerfulness is infectious, it’s catching,” says Laschever. Right before the discussion, do something that puts you in a good mood and calms your nerves. Here are six easy, soothing activities that will help you prep.

8. They emphasize gratefulness, enthusiasm, and value.

All of the experts agree that a negotiation is not an egocentric meeting—you should spend time emphasizing what you bring to the company. “There’s no ‘me, me, me,’” says Harris. Your manager would rather hear how you contribute to the company. “It’s so much more economical to retain great talent than to have to lose somebody and start recruiting from scratch,” says Harris.

9. They outline their accomplishments.

When you talk to anyone about numbers—be it your boss or human resources—you need to be prepared to answer the question, “Why now?” Outline accomplishments and projects that showcase your value. “They don’t really care that you can’t pay your cable bill,” says Ruettiman. “You need to be able to make a strong business case that retaining you is important to the business.”

10. They know their strengths and weaknesses.

The best negotiators are self-aware, and understand where they excel in the company, as well as areas they need to improve upon, says Ruettiman. Not only that, but they also have “a plan of action for addressing their deficiencies.” Everyone is flawed, but if you’re routinely checking in on your performance and improving upon those weaknesses, your manager will remember that during a compensation review.

11. They know when to be silent.

After you present the number or range, sit back and don’t say anything, says Harris. “Too many times, people start trying to fill that silence and end up double-talking or apologizing for asking, and that just weakens your message,” she says. Ask for what you want, and then wait for your answer. A clear and direct approach goes a long way.

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You feel you deserve a higher salary but should you ask for a raise? Let’s look at the facts: You’re long overdue for a raise. Your boss hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with one. Clearly, sitting around and waiting for your boss to give you a raise hasn’t worked so far. What are you waiting for? It’s time to ask for a raise. Here are some tips to help you do that.

1. Find Out How Much Others Working in Your Field are Earning

The first thing you should do before you ask for a raise is learn about typical salaries in your field. You can get this information by using salary calculator tools like Salary.com and looking at salary surveys. If you belong to a professional association, check with it to see if it has salary information available. Begin by looking at the organization's Web Site.

2. Figure Out How Much You Can Earn

Salary calculators and surveys generally present you with a range of salaries. You must determine where you should fit into this range. To do this, consider the number of years you’ve been working in the field and the length of time you’ve worked for your current employer.

3. Evaluate the Financial Health of Your Employer

If your employer is having financial problems this is not the right time to ask for a raise. As an employee, you are probably aware of your company’s financial health, but don’t rely on the office grapevine alone. Do some company research, which includes looking at financial reports and following business news.

4. Prepare Your Argument

You really shouldn’t approach asking your boss for a raise as an argument, but you may have to make your case. Think of it as selling yourself just as you would do if you were trying to get a prospective employer to hire you. Make a list of all the things you’ve accomplished for the employer. Start with the most recent accomplishments and work your way backwards. Also make a list of your relevant skills – the things that make you successful at doing your job.

5. Decide What You Will Do if You Get Turned Down or Don't Get the Raise You Want

Before you walk into your boss’s office to ask for a raise think about what you will do if she says “no” or agrees to give you a raise that is much smaller than the one you want. Will you quit your job or will you wait a while and then ask for a raise at a later date? Your answer may depend on what your boss says. For example, has she turned you down because of your performance? If so, ask yourself if her criticisms are valid. If they are, think about what changes you can make. If they aren’t, you may want to go where you are appreciated. If there is some other reason you were turned down, talk to your boss to find out if she expects the situation to change. If she does, find out when you can talk about this again.

6. Set Up an Appointment to Talk to Your Boss

Show your boss how serious you are about asking for a raise. Treat this as a business meeting. Set up a time to meet with your boss. Don’t discuss your raise with him by email, at the water cooler, or by telephone (unless you and your boss don’t work at the same location).

7. Present Your Case

Your boss may agree to give you a raise immediately. You may have to do nothing more than ask her for one. Wouldn’t that be nice? If that doesn’t happen you may have to do more to convince your boss you should get a raise. Present the material you gathered earlier, including the typical salaries in your field and your accomplishments.

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When interviewing for a new job, it’s natural to want to know about Employee Benefits, Perks, additional opportunities for bonuses or raises, and other information that helps you decide whether a company is right for you or not.

When, and how you ask those questions, however, can have a huge impact on their interest in you as a candidate!

Too often, candidates ask those questions in a first interview, or long before a potential offer is even being considered.

A job seeker may think… “If the salary and benefits don’t meet my requirements, it’s not worth spending more time in this process!”

However, if those questions are asked at an inappropriate time, the process may end sooner than you hope even if you like the answers. Additionally, it’s always good to follow any interview / hiring process through to the end. There are multiple benefits to do so, even if you don’t like the job….

• The more live interviews you can take, the better you get with each one. What better way to get practice that helps you be your best when the right opportunity comes along?
• It’s not unusual, that at the end of an interview process an employer lets you know of another position that may be much more attractive to you. You would not have found out about it if you didn’t continue in the process.
• If an employer is interested enough in you, salary and benefits might be sweetened to get you, or they may find other ways to make up the difference.

If you are asking questions about compensation and benefits before consideration is being given to hiring you at all, the impressions you create are…

• This person is more concerned about what they will get than what’s best for their career
• You are more focused on what you want than what you can contribute
• It’s all about you… versus being of value to the organization
• You’re more interested in vacation / time away, than what you will do while you’re here
• The value of the job / organization is secondary to how much you can squeeze the most out of us

Those and other impressions quickly diminish whatever interest they may have had in you for the role.

Generally, it’s best to wait until an offer is presented to get all those kinds of questions answered… unless they specifically present that information to you in advance and ask what questions you may have.

If you find that the terms are not acceptable and you’re not able to negotiate something that is, you’ve at least gained valuable interview experience and learned all you can about the opportunity and organization. You are never obligated to accept an offer, and a polite and respectful “No Thank You” is appropriate.

Be careful not to hurt your chances at an opportunity too soon. Wait until the appropriate time to ask for details on compensation and benefits!

Always consider the process form the employer’s point of view!

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Get Ready

Before marching into your boss’s office, arm yourself with some critical information.

Start by doing some research into comparable salaries. This data will help both you and your boss understand your true market value and the cost to replace you should you leave. Two good salary-research sites are www.salary.com and www.payscale.com – there are many more, and you should check several because you’ll find wide variations in the results.

Another way to gather general salary data is to review online job postings. You can also ask friends and relatives about pay ranges for professionals like you at their companies.

Of course, your company isn’t interested in paying you based on what everybody else is making, what you need, or what you think you deserve but rather on your value to the company. To provide credible, factual evidence of that value, you need to document what you’ve accomplished.

Pull out your accomplishment file, performance evaluations, and other documentation that will help you recall what you’ve done for the company in the last weeks, months, and years. Write up brief summaries of your activities along with the specific benefits and results – including hard numbers wherever possible. For greatest impact, tie your accomplishments to strategic company initiatives and goals.

Finally, based on comparable salary data, your level of responsibility, and the value you’ve delivered, set a compensation range that you think is fair. Also think about other perks and benefits you might ask for – this approach can be particularly effective at companies that have rigid salary structures and inflexible review periods.

Get Set

Mental preparation is key to a salary discussion that is positive and professional. Your preparation will build your confidence; now it’s time to make sure you are going in with the right attitude.

Banish any thought of demanding a raise, complaining that you’re underpaid, or comparing yourself to others in your department or at your company. You won’t win points by acting entitled or getting angry or emotional. Don’t bring up what you need or any personal situations that have strapped your finances. This is a business issue, and your goal is to stay focused and keep the discussion on a positive note.

Now, mentally prepared and confident, tell your boss you’d like to schedule some time to review your goals for the coming period. Do not tell him or her you are going to ask for a raise, and don’t say you want a performance review. Schedule a meeting in a quiet place.

Go

At the meeting, spell out what you plan to accomplish for the coming period, and get your boss’s agreement to these goals before moving on. Express enthusiasm and excitement for where the company’s going and how you’re going to help it get there.

Next, review what you’ve contributed in the last several months or even longer. Recap your accomplishments, being sure to stress the hard numbers and results. Again, before proceeding, get your boss to agree that these are the most important things you’ve done.

Now it’s time to ask for the raise. Reiterate that you are proud of what you’ve accomplished in the past and excited about the future. But you believe your compensation should be adjusted upward – to reflect increased responsibility, above-and-beyond performance, or significant contribution to company goals.

Then stop talking and let your boss react and respond. By preparing in advance, you should be ready to counter most objections with facts and figures, not anger, emotion, or defensiveness. And remember, in all negotiations it’s best to let the other party state a number first.

Above all, don’t let the discussion get contentious. Don’t threaten to quit. And don’t issue any kind of ultimatum. It’s likely your boss won’t agree to anything right then and there. Thank him or her for listening and establish the expectation and timing for follow-up. Then go write a brief memo summarizing the meeting, send it to your boss, and pursue the matter as diligently and professionally as you would any business issue.

With a businesslike and fact-based approach, you stand a good chance of getting something (if not everything) you want and will preserve your relationship with your boss. Regardless of what you negotiate, don’t let it affect your performance. After all you can use your fresh accomplishment summaries to update your résumé and look for a better-paying job!

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