I am in the lucky position of receiving two internal job offers within a few days of each other from my company. Both came in much lower than I was expecting salarywise. Less than the 25th percentile of the posted salary range, when historically it’s closer to 40% at offer.
When the first offer arrived, I countered, and asked for higher salary, and for the job to go from 50% remote to 100% remote which is what I have now, and what most people on that team are already doing. Their reply was “we think the offer is fair and the hiring manager cant support the role being 100% remote, so we will hold our offer as is”. Um, ok. Weird. They flat out said no to both requests.
When I got the second offer the next day, it was also suspiciously low, but 1k higher and fully remote. I immediately sent an email to the first recruiter saying “my second offer is higher, even though the salary band in the same as yours and they are offering full time remote. Is your offer below the best you are able to do; your final offer at this time?”
Then I sent an email to the second recruiter saying “if you can increase the salary by $3k, I will accept your offer by the end of the day” thinking maybe urgency would help since it was the last day of the month and the quarter on June 30. With both offers being so close, I started thinking maybe my salary expectation was out of line and I’d prefer full remote anyway.
The second recruiter replies “I can’t get that done for you today but I can see what I can do next week. Now that you have 2 offers, I will need to coordinate with the other recruiter. You surely can understand we try to do everything possible to limit competing offers.”
Call me naive. I assumed there wasn’t collusion between recruiters in completely different business segments of my huge Fortune 100 company with over 100,000 employees. I assumed having two offers would HELP me negotiate on my own behalf.
Nah, they’re in cahoots and literally price coordinating. I’m so annoyed I don’t want to take either offer now, but that would mean I don’t make a $20,000 raise either.
I know there are worse things out there, but fuckme. They do everything they can to keep us down.