Chris Moody, president and COO of Gnip, is back with a guest post in his Moody on Management series. Following are Chris’ thoughts on negotiating compensation with a prospective employee. Enjoy and comment freely!
In my last post, I provided a few tips for job candidates when interviewing at a startup. This week I wanted to cover a simple process for hiring managers to follow when communicating with candidates about salary requirements.
There is the old saying that people spend more time planning their vacation than they spend planning their retirement. I’ve found the same concept sometimes applies to job candidates when thinking about their compensation requirements. As the hiring manager, you need to ensure that a candidate has fully considered their compensation needs before you make an offer. Over the years, I’ve refined a simple and effective approach to facilitating this discussion. I’ve used this technique countless times with great results. The process starts with an email to the candidate:
“Dear Candidate,
From a skills and values standpoint, it seems like we are both excited about the possibility of you joining our company. If you agree, the next step in the process from my perspective is to determine if we are aligned from a compensation standpoint. As such, it would be helpful to get the following information from you:
– Current compensation. Please breakout your base salary from any variable compensation if applicable.
– Your view of your current compensation as it relates to your next opportunity. It is particularly helpful if you provide this feedback by selecting from either
a) I believe I’m fairly compensated and would anticipate making the same salary at my next opportunity
b) I’d be willing to take less for the right opportunity
c) I feel I’m currently under valued and looking for an increase of $x in order to be excited about my next opportunity.
If it works for you, I’d prefer to have this communication via email. Over time I’ve found that putting this stuff in writing helps people think about it more before responding.
Love,
Chris”
Of course there are no right or wrong answers. The goal here is simply to get a clear understanding of how the candidate is thinking about their future compensation by using their current compensation as a frame of reference. Best case, the candidate’s expectations align with yours and the offer moves forward with a high probability of success. Worst case your expectations don’t align but you now have a thoughtful starting point for negotiations if you still want to move forward with an offer.
A couple of additional points:
1) Even if the candidate has expressed salary requirements during the screening process or during your discussions, I strongly recommend you have this written conversation as the final step before you make an offer. For example, perhaps your conversations along the way changed their perspective on salary requirements for the position.
2) The key to this approach is to do this communication in writing. I know it can seem silly or impersonal, but it makes a huge difference in terms of requiring people to give thoughtful answers instead of answering on the spot.
Before using this approach I had more than a few occasions where candidates indicated verbally that they wanted $x, we offered $x, and then they responded with “I was thinking about it more and I really need $y to feel good about joining”. Once you hit this situation, it puts both parties in an awkward position and it can be hard to recover. You can avoid this potential pitfall with one simple email.
Oh, by the way, Gnip is hiring!
My long time friend Chris Moody, president and COO of Gnip, has offered to write some guest posts on management – we’ll call the series Moody on Management. In addition to being an outstanding early stage / high growth executive, Chris has made a study of management in startups and is extremely thoughtful about what does and doesn’t work.
His first post is aimed at anyone looking to get a job in a startup and talks about how to be effective at interviewing for a job. Feel free to weigh in if you have other “Stop, Don’t, Nevers” or “Pleases”
I love interviewing people to work at Gnip. Unless I’m having a really crappy day, I enter each interview full of hope and optimism. I’ve done countless interviews in the last 20+ years and I can easily slip into autopilot mode if I’m not careful. In order to avoid this trap, I mentally prepare by reminding myself “today could be the day I’ll meet the next great team member.” I’ve found this mental pep talk helps remind me that there is no better use of my time than investing in the interviewing process. In other words, the next interview could be a company game changer and I need to be 100% engaged.
Most interviews don’t directly lead to someone joining our company. Often the person doesn’t have the right skills or experience. There are plenty of cases where it becomes clear to the candidate that we can’t provide them an opportunity that meets their interest/needs. Both of these outcomes are normal and healthy. Unfortunately, I often find another outcome can occur which is frustrating and deflating. This situation occurs all too often when a person is so poor at interviewing that we’re unable to determine if there is a potential match. I’ll invest up to an hour in an interview trying to peel back the layers. However, I’m frequently unable to get to a substantive layer of discussion that will help both parties determine if there is a potential match. I’ll leave these interviews thinking, “Maybe that person was great, I’ll never know”. Over time, I’ve started to referring to these as the “who knows?” interviews.
The good news is that I think job candidates can follow some simple guidelines when interviewing at a startup that will help avoid the “who knows?”
Stop, Don’t, Never
Please
Ask CEOs of successful startups about their biggest challenge and they’ll often cite the inability to hire great people. My theory is there are plenty of great people, but many are just terrible at interviewing. Hopefully these few tips help lead to more great matches down the road. By the way, Gnip is hiring!
One of the jokes in my little universe is that “every time I hear the word ‘marketing’ I throw up a little in my mouth.” I’ve been joking about this long enough that it’s become conventional wisdom that I hate marketing. Yet, if you look at many of our successful investments, they are extraordinarily good at marketing and some people suggest we (Foundry Group, me) are also good at marketing.
Thirty minutes ago, Chris Moody – a long time friend and COO of Gnip – sent me an extremely thoughtful email titled “Food For Thought”. I read it, thought it was 100% correct, and asked if I could reblog it verbatim both as (a) an explanation of how I actually should / do think about marketing and (b) an example of how I learn through direct feedback.
Chris – thanks for taking the time to write this. You nailed it. The way I articulate how I think about marketing will be permanently different going forward.
At this point I’ve probably heard/read most of your basic philosophical points on the various aspects of building a successful business. I agree with most of them of course. However, there is one area where I’ve consistently felt that you have under represented your true feelings and it feels like your general input on the topic has been mostly nonconstructive. I’d like to try to help change that for the good of the broader entrepreneur community (and to make you look even smarter).
The topic is marketing. I have no doubt missed some brillant thoughts you’ve offered to the community and I’m sure you’ve provided countless pieces of good advice to individual entrepreneurs in one-on-one situations. But, the sound bite version I’ve heard from you on a few occasions goes something like this “I hate traditional marketing. Focus on building a great product or all the marketing in the world won’t matter.” When I think about the first time entrepreneur, this response feels particularly unhelpful. And, the second part of the quote could be applied to almost all aspects of a startup business including sales, finance, etc. If you don’t have a great product, none of the other shit matters.
And yet, when I see how Foundry Group approaches marketing and when I look across your portfolio companies, I see a very common thread around how you guys approach marketing. I would characterize the theme as “marketing through thought leadership.” In more basic terms it is expressing marketing ideas via “this is why we are doing what we are doing and why it is important” instead of “hey, look at me.” Have a new product feature? Sure blog about the feature, but spend way more time on why the feature is important to your overall purpose and beliefs.
To illustrate the point, I’ve recently talked to/interviewed a few current/former people from Rally and ReturnPath. When I ask them “what is the most significant thing you did from a marketing perspective to accelerate the business” the answer across the board has been “we focused on being a thought leader in our space.” As you well know that is the same approach we are taking at Gnip and I see it in many of your other portfolio companies too. Not sure it is always a conscience effort by the companies, but it seems to be pretty consistent across the portfolio..
When I think about FG itself I see tons of “marketing activity” but most of it could also be just be labeled: thought leadership. You sponsor conferences around topics that you care about. Your blog post are rich with “here’s why did it and why it matters” instead of “here’s what we did”. In fact, your whole theme based approach is really about thought leadership focused in a few areas. Foundry Group clearly believes that startups have the power to change the world. You guys spend countless time and effort expressing your opinions on this topic. You write books to support your beliefs. If you only talked about what you do with your startups “we invested in x, we sold y”, the conversation would be short and have a limited audience. Instead, you talk about what you believe and why startups matter. As a result, you have built a real following around people that care about the topic.
If I were going to create the Brad Feld sound bite for Marketing it would go something like this “Don’t do marketing. Focus on becoming a thought leader in your space. Talk everyday with your customers, perspective customers, partners, and the world about why you do what you do and why you think it is important. The reality is you can only talk about what you do one or two times before people think ‘got it’ and stop listening. But, if you talk about what you believe and point to countless examples that exemplify your beliefs , you can build real engagement with people who care/believe the same things.”
Not trying to put words in your mouth. Just saying that the actions that I see don’t match the words that I hear and I think there is easy opportunity to change that for the better.