I SET MYSELF A SALARY OF X AMOUNT, CHEERS!

"Let´s talk money now - nobody lives on just oxygen and love! Hence, what´s your salary expectation in order for you to be motivated and happy in this role?" I ask the candidate this super-easy question in the last stage of the interview. It requires only a short, concrete response - just a number or at least a reference to a level between a set of numbers! But no, yet again we are facing a situation when the eye contact disappears automatically, a recently very talkative candidate transforms in an instant to beetroot-purple, and they murmur: "Well I don´t know...Haven´t really thought about it..." Oooooh crap! I didn´t ask an answer to a mathematical equation that can only be either correct or not. I asked for honesty, straightforwardness, and guts to stand up for one´s value. Why is asking and offering a salary so challenging? And what would happen if one had an opportunity to set their own salary? Chaos, bankruptcy, ripped-off Employer? Apparently not as the practitioners claim.

Full article on how self-setting of salaries could work based on real-life success stories is published in Estonian under the title of "Ma määran endale X summa palka, aitäh!" in a leadership magazine Director (July 2018).