5 Tips For Negotiating Your Next Promotion
1. Evaluate Your Contributions
Take the time to conduct a thorough and honest self-assessment of your performance. Evaluate whether it's realistic to expect a promotion at this time and assess whether your achievements align with your expectations and the expectations of your manager.
This reflective process will not only help you gauge your performance more accurately but also enable you to clearly articulate your contributions - where you went above and beyond of what was expected of you in your current role.
PRO TIP: Conduct a regular self-evaluation by documenting all of your accomplishments and contributions throughout the year. Don’t rely on management to remember your key successes!
2. What’s Your Benchmark?
Research on salary benchmarking is crucial to ensure that your remuneration is competitive and fair relative to others in your industry. It helps you understand your market value, make informed career changes, and negotiate effectively.
Your salary research in combination with your self-evaluation from Step 1 can help you fine-tune your salary expectations when it comes to discussing a raise or an increase during appraisals. You can use this as evidence to argue your case for a desired salary increase.
PRO TIP: As recruitment specialists within Healthcare and Life Science, we can provide valuable insight into current salary benchmarking. So, give us a call to discuss your salary in more detail.
3. Establish A Dialogue
Aim to create a dialogue with your manager before your annual review, especially if you have some non-negotiables that are going to affect the likelihood of you staying within your role at the company (e.g. desired salary increase or promotion to the next level). This will give your manager a heads-up on where you currently stand and what is important to you moving forward.
If you wait until your review to share these ideas, then too much may have already been decided, or the budget for raises may already be allocated. This might restrict what management is able to do for you.
By having this conversation early, you’ll have a better chance of enabling your manager to react to the points that are important to you, which will lead to a successful outcome at your appraisal.
4. Delivering Your Case
Come prepared to showcase your findings on your research with clarity and precision. Talk through the highlights and accomplishments where you’ve added value beyond your current job role and why you believe it’s beyond your role.
This is to ensure that your expectations are clear to your manager. Reference this against your job specifications as proof that you’ve delivered beyond what was expected of you, and therefore, you are already operating at the next level. These are the kind of arguments that create weight to encourage a promotion.
Use your research to ground your request, focusing on objective benchmarks and accomplishments rather than personal needs. This strategy is about building a business case around your skills and contributions for a promotion rather than asking for or expecting one.
PRO TIP: SALARY DISCUSSION
When discussing salary during your appraisals, make sure to use the following objective phrasing: "Based on my market research and expertise, I’m looking for something between $ X - $ Y.” Or, "With my X number of years’ experience and contributions in XYZ, I was aiming for $ X.”
5. Career Trajectory
Exploring your career trajectory and growth opportunities within your team can strengthen your case for a promotion. Highlighting your commitment to long-term development within the company strengthens your likelihood of the company investing in you.
If your market research reveals that advanced skills are required to enable a promotion, share your dedication to professional advancement and how it aligns with the company’s objectives. This approach helps your employer view investing in you and promoting you as a win-win for both your future and the company’s success.
Conclusion:
Negotiating your promotion or raise might feel daunting (and awkward), but taking control of the narrative gives you a stake in the conversation about where you want your career to go within the company.
This will give your management the knowledge of what you want to work towards, your future expectations, and what will keep you engaged over the longer term.
If you have any questions or want to know how to explore any of these aspects in more depth, let us help you.
Book a call with our recruitment team TODAY!