Saying ‘Thank You’ Made Me More Money Than Being Assertive
In our series Salary Stories, women with long-term career experience open up about the most intimate details of their jobs: compensation. It’s an honest look at how real people navigate the complicated world of negotiating, raises, promotions and job loss, with the hope it will give young women more insight into how to advocate for themselves — and maybe take a few risks along the way.
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Age: 30 Location: London Current industry and job title: Fast moving consumer goods, People Manager Current salary: £55,000 Number of years employed since school or university: Eight
Starting salary: £12,000 in 2015 Biggest salary jump: £40,000 to £50,000 in 2021 Biggest salary drop: £35,000 to £32,000 in 2019
Biggest negotiation regret:Not asking enough questions! Early experiences (described below) made me feel like I needed to be grateful for any job offer, and that to ask too many questions might rock the boat. It’s hard when you’re just starting out, but knowledge is power and it helps both sides to be clear on what expectations are.
Best salary advice: Start with ‘thank you’. If you’ve been offered a pay rise, but would like to ask for more, begin with acknowledging what’s been offered so far. Then explain what you had in mind, why you think it is fair, and why you deserve it. Sometimes it feels like we’re told that we need to be aggressive or assertive when it comes to talking about money, but never forget your basic manners in the process.
This internship was at a media company. I was interested in working in advertising and this company worked adjacent to the industry, so it was a great entry point. It was an all-round internship but had a particular focus on PR and Marketing which suited my strengths. I really enjoyed this internship and have often wondered what would have happened if I had been able to stay! The pay was £12,000.Before taking this job, I’d had an unfortunate experience where a lifestyle blogger offered me a position which I accepted before discussing salary. Their proposal was that I be unpaid for a three month trial period before moving to a role paid at £1,000 – £1,500 per month, depending on performance. When I tried to negotiate (to confirm the higher rate) they reneged on the offer and then ghosted me. Luckily the company I was interning at kept me on for a bit longer, but I can’t believe either how naive I was, or how badly I was treated.
So by the time I was offered this job as an internal communications executive, in an industry I really wanted to work in, I was really excited by the salary of £18,000. I was told that if I was kept on at the end of the fixed term contract that I would receive a pay rise and, again with shocking naivety, I took this at face value and never got it put in writing. I moved out of home and into a shared house on the assumption of that pay rise and was stunned not to get it a month later. I escalated the issue to the Director of HR and did manage to negotiate a small one-off payment (of about £1000, pre-tax) to cover travel expenses until they could revisit my salary.
I was privileged enough to be able to live at home in London whilst interning and on a low salary, which allowed me to make these early mistakes without it having a huge material effect on my finances.
When it was time for annual pay reviews across the business, I didn’t need to ask for anything and was given a pay rise to £23,000. It was an increase of almost a third of my salary and an absolute game changer after a tight few months. After a couple of years, I felt like I wasn’t progressing or learning much in my role. This impacted my confidence and I started to look for other opportunities. In the end I was in a position where two similar companies offered me roles at the same time. I stuck with the first one I said ‘yes’ to which offered £30,000, even though the second one counter offered a higher salary of £33,000. I’d been recommended for the first role and felt loyalty to the person who had made the recommendation and awkwardness around negotiating what was already a great pay rise, at a company that would look incredible on my CV.After battling to get any feedback at all from my manager in my first six months, I finally went to my manager’s manager (who was part of the C-Suite). Along with some feedback, I was given a £5,000 pay rise which I think was in tacit recognition of the fact that I was working with a very challenging character and shouldering the burden in quite an isolated role. For the first time in my career, I tried to negotiate, but when they didn’t give me what I asked for I didn’t mind as I was only six months into the role.After a year I could see things with my manager would not improve or change. I took an opportunity for an internal transfer and change of role on the same salary. I thought this was going to be the kick-start to my career after feeling I had been floundering for a few years and salary was never discussed. Whilst I learned a lot, unfortunately the workload was insane, my mental health was the worst it had ever been and I knew I needed to completely rethink. After the company lost a big client I put myself forward for voluntary redundancy — getting two months’ pay as my severance package. I took a few months off — which the severance had allowed me to do — and decided to focus working in-house for a brand I loved. I applied anywhere that I liked, for any role I thought I could get, and got lucky with an offer from a company in my top three. I went for an Office Manager role but they came back about a different role they thought I’d be more suited to. I ended up back in what I’d started out doing, but this time I was part of a proper team, with a lovely group of colleagues. The hiring manager was clear they couldn’t match my last salary but I negotiated up from £29,000 to £32,000, plus a change in job title from Executive to Manager so that my CV didn’t look like I was going backwards. A non-contractual 10% bonus was part of the offer but given the pandemic, this never happened. I was lucky to get a permanent position two weeks before the first lockdown, not that I knew it at the time, having been unemployed all year up until that point.After less than a year in my dream job, structural changes meant my role moved into the parent company. I almost immediately received a promotion and a remit 10 times the size of what I’d been doing. Amazingly and annoyingly, the company recognised how underpaid I had been but red tape meant they couldn’t pay me the salary my predecessor received as it was too much of a jump. Instead, they agreed 25% immediately with a second 25% increase (from the new salary) six months later, without any performance or KPI requirements. This time I got this pay increase to £40,000 in writing. I stuck around long enough to get my second pay rise to £50,000 but there was nothing about the parent company that resembled the dream job that I’d got in 2020. For the second time in my career I reached complete burnout. My manager recognised this and ultimately we agreed that I could leave without working my notice period. I not only received payment in lieu of my three month notice period but also my bonus which was considerable.
My year in that role was the worst in my career, which had a huge impact on my personal life and mental health, but I learned a lot — not least about my own resilience — and it catapulted my salary, so there is a silver lining.
I had already been in conversation with other companies before reaching the decision to leave my previous role, which meant that a couple of weeks into unemployment, I had secured a new job and a bit of time off in between. I was offered £45,000 and the opportunity for a funded professional development course but negotiated to match my last salary of £50,000. I based my argument on the fact that I was based in London where there was a higher cost of living, and luckily had the foresight to predict that in my first year of a new role I wouldn’t have the time to do the course, which wasn’t a requirement, and was therefore unlikely to see the benefits of that offer.I was generously given a 10% pay rise after slightly less than a year at the company, in light of the cost of living crisis. The increase has placed me in a higher tax bracket, so I see less of this pay rise than I’d like to, but it definitely helps and I appreciate that I was given the highest possible increase based on performance and impact — that recognition means almost as much as the money!
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