Hi guys, I’m having a bit of a conundrum with regards to a job offer I have at the moment and I was wondering if anyone could give any advice.
For a bit of background, I’m 26 years old and just earned a master’s degree with distinction from the top university in my home country (UK). No full-time work experience but quite a lot of part-time and freelance experience over the last 10 years. For my first job I’ve been quite keen to work in Japan for a few years. I have native-level fluency in Japanese and a large number of Japanese friends who I don’t get to see very often, but I don’t see myself living in Japan long-term so it would be nice to spend some time there while I still have the opportunity.
I’ve been offered a career-track position in a think tank in Tokyo, which I’m pretty happy about. From conversations with people who work there now and have worked there in the past, the working environment is apparently quite relaxed, and it’d be a good opportunity to meet a lot of interesting people, so after a lot of agonising I do think I want to take the offer.
The only issue is that I haven’t been offered a salary, nor was there one advertised when I applied. Apparently this is because they won’t decide what departments to assign new recruits to until February, and the salary will be partially dependent on the department. However, I have to decide whether to accept the offer before the end of December.
I’ve discussed this with my old supervisor from grad school, and from talking to his contacts within the organisation he reckons it’s likely they’ll offer me around 4m yen. But, considering my strong academic record (the top student in both my undergraduate and masters programmes), he says I’m worth at least 5m and should try to negotiate for 5.5m.
Of course, I’d love that, but I have no experience in this sort of thing at all, and I’m not entirely sure how negotiating for salary would work after I’ve accepted the job offer. Hypothetically say I accept it, and then two months down the line they offer me 4m or less, do I have much leverage to ask for more? Logically it feels like if I was being offered a salary before accepting the job offer, I could say that I’m considering other opportunities that would pay better, and thus put the pressure on the company to compromise on salary to try and keep me. If I’ve already accepted the job offer and confirmed that I’m going to work with them it feels like it would be a lot stickier to say that I’m considering backing out unless they meet me halfway.
Does anyone have any experience of doing anything like this? I don’t feel like I’ll get a better offer in Japan so I do want to take this, and I’m not particularly fussed about getting the highest salary imaginable so long as I’m earning enough to live comfortably, but I’m just nervous about screwing the salary offer up and ending up with something much lower than I’m actually worth. I did work bloody hard for the last 6 years so I’d like to get something good out of it, haha.
Many thanks to all, would appreciate any advice 🙂
4 comments
You can ask. Worst case, they’ll just say no
You can’t start the visa process until there is a contract with a salary on it, so you’re going to have to agree on a number well before you start. Then you’ll have plenty of time to back out if you’re not able to get the number you’re looking for.
So if they’re waiting until Feb to assign you to a department and establish salary guidelines, then you should be able to have those discussions in Feb. It sounds like you’ve got some fairly reasonable numbers in mind, so you’re not going to cause any problems by asking for them.
I’m going to be honest with you, that is super low for British standards, are you sure you want to take it? Even after negotiation, still low.
If you really want to move to Japan permanently, then it makes sense. Otherwise, you are giving up your career and finance.
On one hand, the fact that they haven’t given you salary numbers yet *might* mean that there is a window for negotiation.
But…
You accepted the offer blind, which is going to seriously limit your negotiation room. Generally the leverage you have in a salary negotiation is “This is what it will take for me to take the job”. You already said “I’ll take the job”. So now you’ll be negotiating from a position of “Give me more money *or I’ll quit*”, which is not a great look and is likely to make the company unwilling to be flexible.
You definitely ***can*** try to negotiate when they place you in February. Like u/Benevir mentioned there will be time due to the visa process. But frankly… I don’t think your chances are very good.
You’re thinking about asking for a 25% to almost 40% increase in salary, *after already accepting the offer*. That much of a salary increase would be a hard sell even in a normal salary negotiation, much less in your situation.
I’ve done quite a bit of hiring, and if someone tried to pull a 25% salary increase after accepting the offer they would no longer have an offer.