https://healthyworkcounseling.substack.com/p/the-hwc-job-seeking-and-negotiating
This is the framework document from the Healthy Work Counseling Job Seeking and Negotiating Model. This document includes a large amount of free tools, reframes, and resources for job seeking and negotiating; for Workers to individually use and share for personal purposes.
It's a long and dense document full of resources, I suggest instead of reading it all in one attempt that you save this document and use it as a resource to refer back to.
I really hope this can help workers and job seekers! Best of luck in the fight to get your work needs met! Please let me know about any successes that you have as a result of these tools!
Excerpts:
Job seeking is a vital skill, you must be very familiar with the job seeking process as a Worker in America, because when you stay at any job for too long (over 2-3+ years) you lock yourself into the Company’s pay scale, and move yourself away from the actual market rate for your skills. One analysis of 2023 Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that typical raises from staying at a job are 1-3%, whereas the average raise from a job change is 15.4%! It is a widely acknowledged statistical fact that in modern America you will make more from job changes than staying at any job; here’s an article from ten years ago where Forbes recommended changing jobs every 18-24 months and estimates a 50% loss of revenue over just ten years by staying at one job… over a lifetime career losses by not regularly job seeking will be far greater! Here another writer at Forbes said the same thing again last year. You can find the same articles on virtually every news site on the internet citing the same BLS data; you must job seek regularly to earn a living wage! You will significantly hurt your own career by not job seeking regularly!
While some believe current American Workers change jobs more frequently than was the case for past generations, the data on employee tenure show that career jobs (individuals holding only one job their entire career) never actually existed for most Workers, and continue to not exist for most Workers. Furthermore, when the labor market has been strongest, such as in 2022, the tenure of Workers has tended to be shorter, as more individauls start new jobs by being newly employed or by changing jobs due to more opportunities from a tight labor market.
-Craig Copeland, PhD “Trends in Employee Tenure, 1983-2002,” EBRI Issue Brief, no. 578 (Employee Benefit Research Institute, January 19, 2023)
Many Americans don’t seem to understand just how common changing jobs is, and just how mythical “a career job” is. Your average American Worker changes jobs at least 12 times over the course of their career, and typically will stay any job for 5 years or less. These lifetime workers do not exist. The few workers who stay with one employer and never job seek to reassert their value are habitually undervalued and underpaid (per above Forbes links and BLS data). It becomes outright delusional to buy into the myth of one job taking care of you through a career, or this being a new issue only to young generations. In fact, the following model argues that believing one job will take care of you is dangerous, and puts that worker at a much higher risk of exploitation.
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For a time my job was to be the counselor working with hospital staff in a city with a high cost of living. I would ask Workers about pay, and I learned about massive pay gaps between nurses or any other type of staff. One nurse of ten years experience is earning $65,000 a year, and another nurse right next to them doing the same job with the same experience is earning $110,000 or more! The cause was simple, it was number of employers or jobs over a career: nurses who stayed with this one hospital for their entire career were not taken care of, given appropriate raises, or paid the same as nurses who would regularly job seek and either change or threaten to change jobs regularly. Aside from pay, these “career nurses” felt trapped and unable to change jobs, hopeless about their situation, and often not knowing how to build a resume or job seek. They would complain of feeling helpless, powerless, and would experience constant burnout (or other health issues). It turns out that Companies do not take care of you for staying, and all data shows that in 2020s America, Workers of all skill and experience levels must job seek and change jobs regularly to have any hope of earning a living wage or improving their careers!
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Just last month it was revealed that 27% of hiring managers admitted to having current job postings that they are not attempting to fill. These 27% of managers could be responsible for upward of 50% of all job offers on sites like Indeed and Linkedin. This disturbing data means you must start off your job seeking process by recognizing that 30-50% or more of your applications are sent to these “Ghost Jobs” and go straight in the trash due to the state of modern job seeking in America.
Of the remaining applications that are seen by a hiring manager who is actually interviewing, the biggest determining factor in if you will get an interview or an offer is how subjectively desperate the Company is hiring for this position! In other words, how likely you get an interview or job offer isn’t just about you as a Worker, it’s largely about the Company situation too! For example, how many other applints do they have? How long have they been trying to fill this position? How desperate are they for the help, how quickly do they need workers, how great are the losses while this task is not done? So among the Companies that see your application, you can rank your likelihood of getting a job offer from any one Company as 1-5, based almost entirely on how desperate the hiring situation is for them. In other articles we will refer to this as the Company BATNA as well.
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When Workers follow the correct order of operations, and counteroffer for more after the company makes their job offer, the worker has the highest likelihood of getting their needs met. When a company makes a job offer, they stated that they want that specific worker, the Company is bought in, they have a “sunk cost fallacy” and an Anchoring Effect among other cognitive biases affecting them, they do not want to change their mind and go talk to another worker instead! The time periods between when a job offer is given by the Company and when it is accepted by the Worker are the few moments in a Worker’s career where they have the most power over the Companies; these are the moments the Company is briefly subservient to the Worker and asking for their signature, and the balance of power between Company and Worker is completely inverted!
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The two founding concepts of Healthy Work Counseling’s Job Seeking and Negotiation Model are Understanding your Work Needs and Understanding Your Value
Work Needs are anything subjectively important to the Worker. Only the Worker can identify their own needs, others cannot, and the Company cannot. Examples include more visible needs like pay, benefits, hours, schedule, location, commute, WFH ability, job duties, and so on. Work Needs also can be less visible such as a supportive workplace, healthy management, autonomy (vs micromanaging), a reasonable workload, flexibility for personal needs, good work/life balance, physically healthy job duties and environment, materials needed to do the job, good instruction to do the job, opportunities for growth, etc. etc… the list of valid work needs is literally endless, and completely up to the worker to identify which needs are most important to them.
Your Value As A Worker is why it’s always okay to ask for, negotiate, demand, and leave jobs to meet your needs. By definition the Worker is always earning the Company significantly more than they are paid, so it’s okay for the Worker to request or demand their work needs are met. If the Company fails to meet any needs, there are almost always other Companies who may give a better offer. Outside of collective action such as union support, the greatest tool for an individual worker to get their work needs met is the ability to generate job offers and compare them to the current Company. By job seeking and asserting your value, you can demand your needs are met, either by leaving or leveraging the threat of leaving. The threat of leaving is the only option for the Worker to generate leverage (later referred to as BATNA) to demand their needs are met.
In order to run a efficient workplace, the Company should always try to meet all the Worker’s needs as their #1 priority, because when they improve job satisfaction they also improve work productivity, output, and profit!
But they usually don’t.
By paying more, the Company gets a happier and better worker for a longer period of time. When the Company pays better wages they earn more profits in the end. The Worker negotiates more from job offers and regularly job seeks and demands more because it helps them AND the Company.
Supportive workplaces encourage Workers to ask for needs and try to meet them; Toxic workplaces try to minimize, attack, or gaslight away the Worker’s needs and will never attempt to meet the Worker’s needs in good faith. When a Worker’s needs aren’t being met, they naturally will go to the market to explore other jobs that will meet their needs better. If asking for needs fails, the Worker must job seek to meet their needs, by delaying they are only hurting themselves by staying in a situation where their needs are unmet! It is a lie when your job is really bad and you say “all jobs are like this,” maybe you can’t find a “perfect job” but you usually can find ones that will meet some of your needs better!
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Over my medical career many managers pulled me into job interviews, I’ve sat on the hiring side of dozens. Maybe workers don’t understand what this looks like from the Company side. The most important thing to understand about job seeking is that there’s incredibly high variation between different hiring situations: sometimes the Company would have 20 interviews for one position where workers had a 5% chance of getting a job offer, and at other times the Company was desperate, begging for applicants, and anyone who applied and wasn’t overtly problematic was guaranteed to get a job offer!
It’s worth knowing that the Company does not necessarily pick the “best” candidate in these mass interview situations. When you’re doing over 20 interviews in 2 weeks, everyone on the Company side is so exhausted from this dumb process! The job offer always went to someone who interviewed late, usually the final interviewee, because we didn’t remember the early interviews! Anyone who interviewed in the first week had no chance of getting a job offer, regardless of how good their resume or interview was. It was idiotic for everyone involved, a disrespectful waste of everyone’s time! Did you think that interviewers are computers who judge every factor and then pick the best candidate? That’s insane!
It was really incredible what I’d see when the hiring situation was grim. One hospital program that prided itself on providing world class medical treatment had so much trouble keeping licensed nursing staff that it changed policies and started putting “working interns” aka unlicensed students in nursing school. I’ve seen companies no longer require experience or college degrees when they struggle to hire people, going so far to overlook licensure issues, and even criminal histories when the situation was dire enough!
On one occasion I’ll never forget, a manager at a “high end” substance abuse clinic asked me to sit in on an interview for front desk staff, at the time they were desperate for help. To put it gently, the prospective worker arrived visibly intoxicated. Afterwards, the manager was trying to talk themselves into giving this person an offer, they were clearly struggling with an addiction and would be a visible face for the substance abuse clinic. If I wasn’t there, I think they would have made that job offer, they really didn’t care.
When a Company is desperate for help, they will do anything to get that help, even to extreme degrees, a worker interviewing at that time has a guaranteed job offer and incredible negotiating power for more. On the other side, there are some hiring situations where it is practically impossible for the worker to get an interview or an offer. Understand that a major part of this numbers game of job seeking is that you want your applications to hit those more likely to hire, more desperate employers. You are more likely to get offers from them, and because they have a very weak BATNA you are in an ideal negotiating position!
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The HWC Job Seeking and Negotiating Model argues that you must always attempt to negotiate more, and that it is literally always the correct move to try to negotiate more pay or needs from all new job offers, regardless of circumstance. Here’s why:
The biggest fear people have against negotiating is some worst case scenario where a job offer is pulled because you negotiate more. That’s fiction. In my career counseling clients about work issues, I’ve never actually heard of an Company pulling a job offer because a prospective Worker tried to negotiate. It would be crazy for the Company to remove their job offer because you asked for more needs… they already are heavily invested in you joining because they made an offer! They want you! So the actual typical outcomes of negotiating are: a. Your counteroffer is met b. They compromise and meet part of your counteroffer or c. They decline to offer more, they say the original offer stands and they hope that you take it.
So there is no practical bad outcome from negotiating all job offers for more pay. In all outcomes you’re at least where you started, if not getting more pay just for asking! In this hypothetical fear where a job offer is pulled, that Company acted so far outside of normal professional behavior that you should be grateful you’re not working with them, they seem wildly toxic!