If You Want Good People, You Gotta Pay For 'Em

But we're in a newer reality around automation and greed right now.

We might have a little salary range crisis in North America these days. Let’s paint up the picture.

First: even though in some respects it makes no sense, most companies still compete on cost-cutting plays.

As a result of that: bigger companies actually have an incentive/desire to drive down wages, which is the opposite of what your mom and dad told you for generations.

Third little pickle: most people don’t know what their salary represents and are terrible at trying to negotiate it.

The overall ecosystem gives a lot of power to the company side. They feel like “Well, we can find someone else.” (People are usually irreplaceable to decision-makers, sadly.) On the employee/candidate side, there’s a bunch of frustration. You feel like you have all these skills and are in debt because you built up your education bonafides, and now everyone is trying to undercut you.

Told this story in other blogs but once I saw a bullet list of 17 items for a job description. Needed tons of experience. Marketing “director” position. (We all secretly know directors are paper pushers but ignore that for now.) At the bottom, salary range? $55,000-$60,000.

Sorry Company A, but you ain’t gonna get someone with 17 skills and a MBA at $60K. They’re gonna go chase other butterflies.

Eventually Candidate B will accept the job — because he has to, dude’s been out of work — but it’s not what the hiring manager wanted. So he’ll bellow about a “skills gap,” then offer the same job at $50K to the next batch of candidates.

Final fly in this ointment: the “job-hopping stigma.” It’s impossible to make more money in the modern age without job-hopping. That’s almost a 100 percent true fact. It makes perfect sense, too: if you do well in your job and your manager is kind of an idiot, what incentive would that manager have to move you? You make them look good. This isn’t brain surgery here. It’s basic human psychology.

Let’s talk on this stigma for one second with some MIT research around the salary range issue.

The salary range and good young managers

MIT hit this ditty about retaining quality young managerial talent recently, and this part pops out: