US
An old colleague of mine asked me to be a referee on her CV. She was applying for a back-office role in financial planning for which she has about 10 years’ experience, including leading a team and working in London.
During her job search she noticed an advertisement, which had been online for sometime, and decided to apply. She emailed her CV and heard back within an hour. An interview was hastily arranged and she went the following morning, having researched the market price of the job.
You’re very good
At the interview they told her how well suited she was for the role and how impressed they were with her experience. Within 20 minutes they asked her when she could start and even specified a time by which they wanted her to be completely settled into the role. At that point she started feeling uncomfortable about why the selection process was going so fast.
The interviewers asked her what her salary expectation was and she told them she had done her research and reviewed the job spec. She then gave what she thought was a fair figure. The interviewers’ faces dropped and they started laughing. Their salary proposal was several thousand less than she had hoped for. She pointed out that she had been earning a similar amount more than five years ago.
You’re very bad
The interview then got stranger still. Instead of the interviewers calmly explaining that her proposed salary was just too high for them, they started questioning the very capabilities which they had been praising a few minutes before.
They told her that she wasn’t really that qualified after all, and probably hadn’t even understood the process of what she had been doing in her previous roles. They accused her of having worked routinely, without having to think.
After about 10 minutes of being told she wasn’t competent enough to ask for that salary, the interviewers said they still really wanted her to work for them, at a lower price. She politely told them where to go and realised that her current employer may not have been so bad after all.
Recruiters to the rescue
I actually believe that in her case, had the job been advertised via a recruiter and not directly, it would have saved everybody’s time because the recruiter could have probably provided a salary range in the first phone call.
In all my dealings with recruiters, the one thing that never fazed me was telling them what salary I wanted – something I always struggled with when dealing with the firm itself.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of eFinancialCareers.
i think she probally went to the asian company
coz asian just have to pay less for the same job compare to other euro company.
This may be due to a difference in employer/employee expectations for the same role in London and Singapore. Perhaps, it should not be compared like-for-like. A better comparison would be Hong Kong and Singapore (not the best I know but a closer one).
A firm operating off London is in most probabilities larger than a similar one in Singapore. Hence, expectations need to be researched, assessed, and managed in the local, not global context. There is also a higher tax rate applied in London than Singapore, and the subject may have used gross renumeration rather than net (a supreme discount after tax) as a basis of comparison. A friend of mine revealed how her boyfriend would have to take a 60-70% pay cut in order to relocate from the U.S to Singapore for different firms in the same role. The gap is clearly widely wide.
Also note readers are hearing from the subject’s side of the story, but not the employers’. So readers may like to give some leeway.
I could imagine such interviews taking place.. The candidate made a good decision… I think the interviewers are just not professional enough to explain to her why the role cannot pay upto the candidate’s expectations rather than telling that candidate that she is not worth the money.. an honest & transparent explanation may actually help spread the good word about the employer’s professional approach even though the candidate may not take up the job..
The interviewers assume that whatever they offer the interviewee will be blindly accepted due to sheer desperation. The intetviewers should go for a thorough training on conducting interviews. They forget that someday, they could also be interviewees.
I discovered the Asian banks can be particularly professional in their interviews – personal experience.
Poor interviewers… that I have experienced with lower tiered European banks.
I think the candidates apprehension was right “why were they rushing in 20 minutes” – was because they were seeing a candidate too good for the price they were thinking to pay. However, after hearing her expectations, the grapes turned sour. In a competitive market place like Singapore where there are minimum 30 applicants for a post, the recruiters probably skim through the heap of CVs to pick and without proper assessment have probably wasted their time as well the candidate’s. They should respect the candidate’s expectations (more so because she was earning a high salary) and not continue to offer a low salary in addition to persuading her to take the job. God bless those interviewers.