This article is part of the Design Your Promotion and Get Paid at the Right Number course. Click here to explore the full course.
Kalina came to me two months after her company’s promotion cycle had closed. She had a 3% increase nobody had asked her opinion about, and she’d expected a lot more than that.
Nine months later she had the senior title and £75,000. Up 24% on where she started.
None of it was new work. She took the year she’d already worked, sourced what it was worth, and said so out loud.
She didn’t enjoy all of it, and I’ll come back to that.
Where your 3% came from
I set numbers like that one. Worth saying up front, because it makes the rest of this awkward for me rather than for you.
Where I work, salaries get reviewed in January. The pool gets sized the previous autumn, against a revenue forecast, by people reading a headcount model.
By the time a percentage reaches you it has been through finance and through a manager ranking his own team, and not one person in that chain opened your pull requests.
A company will try to pay you the smallest amount that keeps you. I know, because I’m sometimes the person being asked to do it.
So your January number is accurate. It’s a fact about your employer’s budget. It reaches you as a fact about your worth, and that is bullshit.
You accepted that 3%, and then you were annoyed about it for a year.
What it costs them to replace you
Give me 10% and it costs my employer 10%.
Lose me and it costs a recruiter fee, a notice period covered twice over, and about 6 months of somebody new learning what I knew on the Friday I left. SHRM puts replacing an employee at 50% to 200% of annual salary. For senior roles the Center for American Progress puts it as high as 213%.
Your manager understands that arithmetic better than you do. He’s run a backfill. He knows what the agency charged and how long the new person took to stop asking questions.
If you leave, the company pays market rate for your replacement anyway. It pays a stranger, and you walk out with everything you know about why the ingestion job is written the way it is.
You never say you’re leaving. Say it and you have to do it, or your word is worth nothing for the rest of your time there. You only have to know it’s true while you’re sitting in the conversation.
And before everything else, here’s the link to the first part of my Promotion OS I use with all my coaching clients and help them earn more.
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