Neither my husband nor I have every worked in what I would call the corporate world, nor did our parents. My daughter has been applying for a new job in a new field after finishing grad school in this new field last year. She has been working for 7 years at two companies, one was a spin off of the other and she was ready for a chance. The new career path is know, at least when first starting out, to not be as high paying as her current field. She knew this going in to interviews and crunched numbers to figure out what income she could get by on.
The first company she interviewed with, she thought would be a dream job on the surface; she said if she had handwritten the job description of her perfect job, this would be it! After many rounds of interviews and a second call to verify her salary request, she was offered a position today. To her surprise, they offered her $5K/year more than she is currently earning. Never did she imagine she would make close to what she was currently receiving, so now she is wondering if she should have upped the salary requirement.
Again, not knowing how large companies work, I would guess they already had an amount in mind before she even interviewed, and there might not have been a lot of wiggle room. She of course can not ask for more, as they offered more than she requested. The new company may have asked for her current salary, I am not sure. She was so surprised with the offer, and she was 100% sure she would be taking a cut in pay if she took this job. My daughter is not asking my opinion, nor would she want my input; I am just curious how this all works. Even knowing the new field is lower paying, should she have gone higher?
Luckily, my daughter has a well paying job now, and will be able to walk into a new job with not time in between. Actually, she is required to give an eight weeks notice, and the new company wants her ASAP, but knows that might not happen. If she doesn’t finish out this job until the end of the year, it would leave her current company without someone in her position to finish out the fiscal year. While she has been unhappy for a good while at work, she does not want to dump on them. It is also possible that once she gives notice tomorrow they tell her to walk which actually would be fine with her!
My daughter lives in the UK; I believe 8 weeks is fairly standard, at least it has been so with the companies both she and her husband have worked. Actually, when she gave notice at her previous job before starting grad school, they had her pack her belongings and leave; she still got paid for the 8 weeks
Does she have a written contract specifying an 8 week notice? Many (most?) companies can release an employee with no notice - employment at will ( not meaning the will of the employee!). (I believe state employment law may be a factor here.) I have always had reservations about displaced loyalties in these situations - expecting more out of the employee than the employer feels fit to give. Hopefully, you will get a response or two from an HR person with better informed thoughts.
Admirable that she doesn’t want to dump on the current company, but I would (and have) encouraged an adult kid to watch out for his own best interest. And yes, a company may not want to keep on an employee who has submitted a resignation - all sorts or reasons, security, employee morale, etc. This has happened to me, to my delight!
Large companies have HR and recruiting specialist to determine what the market will bear. If they underpay then they will risk employees leaving and potential employees not accepting offers. I doubt it if your daughter could have gotten higher pay if she upped her salary requirement. On the flip side, they may not have considered her if her requirement was too high.
@oldfort That would be my thought as well. I know at her first company, the salary was tied to the job title; all managers received the same start salary.
@Momofadult Her contract does indeed specify 8 weeks notice. The current company asked her last week if there was any wiggle room, but she was not going to inquire about that without an actually offer!
Ironically, this new job falls under HR, but I think HR in the UK is not like it is here. I tried to read the job description when it was posted on the company website; I had no clue what it said!
Ooops! I have one working overseas also - laws, norms, customs are different! I posted the above before I saw the specifics on your D’s situation. Good luck to her! Maybe CC has a UK HR expert!
In the US, some companies may require 4-8 weeks, but more often than not they do not enforce it. I had someone resigned and I really needed him to stay for the duration to finish up a project, but he wanted to leave after 2 weeks so he could take some time off. HR told me that it was hard to enforce, so he left after 2 weeks.
Yes, 8-12 weeks notice is common in the UK (and in EU countries in general). Depending on the reason the employee is leaving, the employer may pay in lieu of notice; this is sometimes referred to as “garden leave.” Two weeks is the standard in the US, although it’s rarely specified in writing.
I have typically had 3 months’ notice in my jobs here. When I have had new job offers, my new employer has always asked me to join asap. I always accepted the offer with a promise that I would try and negotiate down my notice period. I would then go to my old boss and promise that I would do a proper handover to my replacement. This typically took one month. In every case, I have ended up compromising by working for one month and then get one month of paid (“gardening leave”) leave from my old employer so I ended up starting the new job after 2 months rather than 3.
This would not work for your daughter, but if she promises to work hard for a good handover, her old boss should agree to release her early. If her new company cannot wait 4 - 6 weeks for her, that is a red flag that maybe the new firm is not right for her.
Regarding notice:
There are two camps (obviously with middle ground between them):
those who leave when it is most beneficial to them without regard to their current job.
those who take their current responsibilities into account when leaving their current job.
Both my kids went out of their way to never leave current employees stuck. They did this even though they knew many jobs would not treat them as kindly. I believe it shows good character. I also think a new employer will then realize that you won’t walk away from your new job with little notice or care.
Salary: I think most jobs have a range they are willing to pay for a particular job. I think it’s always good to ask if there is any room to negotiate salary when given an offer by an employer. Starting salary is huge as most future raises and bonuses and 401k match will be based off a percentage of this. But if there is no room they might agree to increase vacation time or work from home etc.
My one kid flatly turned down a job offer due to salary. They came back within 4 months with a 20% increase offer and a designated free parking space in a crowded city where parking is at a premium. She then took the job.
Your daughter sounds terrific… If she does a great job they might increase her salary so as not to lose her. You just never know.
As others have said, when people hire they generally have a salary range in mind, and it is also likely that when they made the job offer it was not at the top of the range for that position, so yes, your D may have been able to get more money (you can always, when they make an offfer, turn it down). I had one job I applied for where they told me my salary requirement was fine, and then when I got the formal offer it was like 15% below what we had agreed on…needless to say, I didn’t take that job. Later on the hiring manager called, apologizing, saying it was mixup and offered me what I had originally agreed to, but knowing the way companies work, that lowball said a lot about the company and its ethics (or lack thereof), and I later heard that they did this routinely thinking they were gonna pull a fast one (beancounters being as blind as usual).
It is possible that they liked her enough that that offer was above the original range, that is rarer, but not unheard of, if they really like a candidate they will fight to offer them better money to attract them.
That said, given your D was pleasantly surprised by the offer and wanted to work there, it wouldn’t make much sense to try and get more money out of it given she needed a job and this to her was a dream job.They obviously liked her, enough to give her a decent offer, and it also means if she works out she likely would see increases down the road. It would be different if she was already working and if this wasn’t necessarily a dream job, then she could possibly negotiate up, but given what you said, she would be smart to take the job:).
Congrats @snowball ! Exciting news!! Just as an aside, the copany my DH works for has office overseas. The European folks wanting to take a new job had to give… wait for it… 6 mos notice. And they kept them for a good part of it, IIRC.
In the US it all depends on the company and how you are hired. If you have a formal contract, it often specifies things like how much notice, but IME I applied to very few jobs that had a formal notice period as part of the hiring agreement (non compete, yeah, but not that). The typical notice was two weeks, but that has been more customary than anything else, sometimes an employer will negotiate a longer notice period in return for something, maybe vesting something like stock grants or whatnot in return. In a right to work state, unless you have a formal contract, you don’t have to give any notice (the same way with white collar jobs you can walk into work one day and be shown the door, no severance, no anything). Back in the day, there was supposedly an informal rule that you were supposed to give notice as X weeks, where X was some formula based on how long you worked for the company and/or based on salary level, so the longer/higher you were there, the more notice, but I think that went the way of so many things in the work world.
I thought rule of thumb was as many weeks vacation you get is as many as you should give to leave. But I get people just calling in quitting too with no notice at all. Which then never gives them a good reference, and it’s usually mostly sticking it to the the co-workers.
If she was happy, end of story. I always have a tight range in mind, within a few thousand. I ask for salary history, just to see if they tell me, but the telling thing I usually ask for is salary requirement. If you want way more than what the job pays I know not to bother, and also if you tell me way too low, I know you probably aren’t qualified or don’t at all understand the position.
Congratulations to your D! It is so nice when a job you would like also is financially a good move.
I remember when our son had applied for a couple of jobs, hoping for one place and hadn’t yet heard when he came home for a visit after graduation (he still had his apartment). He got the phone call and went to his room for privacy. He also was still naïve at the time and didn’t know how much to ask for. He was excited when he hung up and was impressed with the salary offer. Later we googled info about things (Glass Door et al) and found he was getting a competitive salary for the job/industry… Let’s just say he is lucky to like and do well in a field that pays well (computer software). Thank goodness he didn’t need to settle for the other job- it would have meant employment but not a good career starter like the one he got.
I can’t imagine working out an 8-12 week departure. I’ve worked out a few 2 week ones and it was horrible. Usually by about day 5 or 6 I’d finished the projects or handed them off, cleaned up everything, filed everything. Nothing left to do but go to lunch and say good bye - over and over again. Very rarely has the company hired someone to take my place in that time, so the work was going to my peers, and that was not going to change if I gave 2 weeks or 2 months notice.
A few of my jobs had a known end date (clerkship, agency closing) and those are hard too. For up to a year you know you are ending of X date, don’t take on projects that aren’t going to finish by then, and have too much time at the end spent just sitting around.
My prior employer (3rd party pension administration and consulting) wanted four weeks’ notice. Not that the owner generally got it from people…
I gave him two months’ notice, and then he fired the operations manager a week later. I had been there fourteen years and knew the secrets to the kingdom. As soon as the ops manager was canned, everyone came to me instead with questions, so most of my notice period was dealing with that stuff. Still managed to write procedure manuals, train people and deal with customer handoffs. Owner of the company didn’t hire anyone to replace me or the ops manager during that time.
My daughter gave her notice in person to her immediate boss, and in writing. The hard part was she is on a two week work trip and her boss happened to be with her in the same city; luckily he was leaving today, so she doesn’t have to be with him until back in the UK at the end of next week. What I found interesting, is while her notice (which is in writing in her contract,) is two months, not 8 weeks, her last day of work will be December 23rd which she agreed to. Contractually, she only has to stay until the 20th and her boss wants her until the 31st; I guess they came to a compromise. He told her no way he would allow her to leave early; if he would have, she would have taken a week off and then started the new job! We have only texted a bit, so hoping to talk to her this weekend.
The new job is being held for her, which always seems to be the way with my daughter! Her current job and boss first interviewed her in the winter 2013. She was offered the job, but due to the type of visa she had at the job she had just given notice to, they could not issue her a visa. She had to leave the country, but returned 9 months later for grad school; something she had wanted to do for years, but the timing was never right. Once she was back in the country, she was again approached by this company to work for them. They tried to get her part time; with her student visa, she could not work full time, plus grad school took up almost every waking hour. Once she was close to finishing school, they contacted her again. It was not “the” job she wanted, but it allowed her to stay in the country and be with her fiancee. It was a job she knew, instead of a job change she wanted. I think because they wanted her so much, she figured why bother to look for a different job; she has now learned not to settle and money isn’t the only thing to look at. One thing her current boss did say was he was disappointed that he spent 2.5 years trying to hire her, and she did not give back that time; although he understood she was leaving for a career change.
My SIL might actually be the happiest, as he is very tired of listening to my daughter complain about work! Once she got married and applied for her marriage visa, she was able to look for jobs anywhere, not just companies that could provide a work visa for her. As far as salary goes, she could what if all day, but hopefully she has found a job where she can grow and enjoy.
