If Ya Want Good People, Ya Gotta Pay For ‘Em

A simple lesson, almost never learned.

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.