The salary negotiation script that tripped me up for 4 months
I spent four months trying to follow all the popular advice about letting the other side name a number first. Every recruiter I talked to in Phoenix would just go silent on the phone and I kept caving and spitting out my current pay. Turns out the real problem wasn't my timing, it was that I never practiced saying the actual number out loud until I ran through it with a friend in my kitchen. After one 20 minute mock call where he kept pushing back, I finally got comfortable with my salary range and closed at 12% more than my first real offer. Has anyone else found that the standard scripts fall apart when the person on the other line is just really good at waiting?
Did you find that the silence got way easier to handle once you'd already said the number out loud a bunch of times at home? I had the same thing happen (my roommate played the tough recruiter, bad cop energy and all) and after that the real silence didn't scare me anymore.