Negotiation-Selecting the right job

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Framing negotiations has been part of my life, like anyone else’s, since childhood. Examples
include negotiating with my brothers over the gifts my father brought when he came back from
his business trips, negotiating with my parents over why I should get a bike in the summer
holidays, negotiating with my friends over which place to hangout over a weekend and
negotiating with my boss over the timeline of the project deliverables. These events didn’t give
me a chance to reflect on what I learnt from each of them and how I could gain from these
experiences. Most of these negotiations were a means to maximize my rewards, without the
consideration of the other party’s interests and without much structured learning through these
negotiations. Usually the side with the most power had their say and things moved on. This was
particularly true when my younger brother went overboard, throwing a tantrum to ensure
everyone would agree to his demands for the gift! This was similar to my work situation at my
job, when I was overambitious of my targets and took up the challenge to achieve them without
considering the timelines of other projects and businesses that would eventually affect me in
negative ways.

Most of the above examples are fundamentally distributive negotiations. Now the time has
arrived to analyse one of the most critical negotiation situation I had encountered in my life.
Through this exercise I am trying to understand what I did right and what I could have done in a
better way. This is an integrative negotiation where I had faced a lot of problems and had to deal
with it by creating a joint value for various interested parties from a negotiation. Reflecting on
the negotiation that took place three years ago, I am trying to understand what tactics that I used
were and what I could have missed. Employing an inappropriate tactic in a negotiation may lead
you to the wrong side of a negotiation.

Before 7 years

I managed to get into one of the most reputed engineering courses in India. I became self
confident of my future and was happy to be in that position. I thought to myself that there was
nothing I had to worry about. Life would not be as difficult, now that I had worked through
various entrance exams to be there. I have to agree that this phase of complacency was short
lived.

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As I passed through the third year of Mechanical engineering, I came to know that there was
more to finding a descent job than I had initially thought. I started attending pre placement talks
from various prestigious corporations that came to campus. I came to know that each and every
job offered-different responsibilities, different expertise that could be gained through those
responsibilities and different career prospects. As I dug deeper into it, I realised that this was
going to be trickier than I had previously imagined.

I started applying for the jobs and received a call from almost each one of them, looking to set up
an interview. The outcome was four different job offers. This is when I grasped the criticality of
the situation I was getting into. I was looking for opportunities to stay in my field of interest.
Most of my job offers met those expectations, but each one was quite different. To illustrate the
difference in what they had to offer, I have created a table to summarize.

Factors Job offer 1 Job offer 2 Job offer 3 Job offer 4

Job Role Position/ R&D Engineer in Process R&D Engineer Production
Responsibilities Mechanical design Engineer /Asst. Engineer
Manager
Industry/Company Public Sector A well renowned A world Class An Multinational
Defence Petrochemical Automotive OEM Automotive part
Electronics Company Company. Supplier
Company
Compensation 85/100* 80/100* 85/100* 70/100*
Contractual 3 year bond with No Bond. One 3 year bond with No contract
Terms company & high year training company & high
bond breaking Period. bond breaking
charges. charges.
Perks & Other Accommodation, None Food and other travel Not many benefits
Benefits lunch & phone provided. One week
bills taken care of. Holiday package at
Options of company resorts.
availing lower
interest loans.
Deal Maker/ Deal Parents saw this Petrochemical Good Organizational Had good
Breaker Points job as a safe and industry had good Brand. Many reputation in the
secure option. future potential. opportunities to get auto parts industry.
But bureaucratic Location at my an exciting Less learning
structure of public home town. experience. opportunity in the
organization was a Job profile didn’t Recommended by job role. I wasn’t
big turn off for excite me much. the college professor keen on production
me. and college seniors. engineering.
*A base of 100 is used rather than actual salary expectations from a job at the time of negotiations

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Now let us examine various parties of interest and how they influenced my emotions and hence
my negotiation in selecting the job:

College Placement office-The placement office wanted me to select an option as early as

possible. This was because they didn’t want recruiters to wait for my reply for a long time and
take away offers made to me and other college students. They were looking at this from a long
term perspective of attracting the recruiters for future recruitment and maintaining their strong
student brand to attract more recruiters. This created immense amount of pressure on me to come
up with a quick decision.

Family-My family wanted me settle for an option which would provide a long term secure job
with moderate work load and good compensation. This is what I define as an ideal job. They also
thought of my long term stability and well being. The pressure from the family was intense on
selecting one of the options before it was too late. I thought to myself that it would have been
easier to have one option rather than to decide on 4 different job options, each of them offering
me completely different future prospects.

Friends-My friends and peers thought of me as a competitive and aspiring personality. Most of
them had the luxury of getting just one offer which they selected as their destiny. Some of them
came to me to give their advice and their justification of selecting an offer they thought to be
right. Most of their thoughts were concentrated on short term gains and compensation.

Gurus-My mentors & professors, with whom I had created a strong personal relationship, talked
to me at length and tried to understand my needs and my priorities on job selection. I wasn’t sure
of this myself. This is where I wanted to go back and understand my true needs.

My future looked uncertain. This led me to introspect on my needs and what I saw of myself in
the future. Eventually I ended up selecting the job No 3 at Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd.

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How and why I chose the job No. 3

All I wanted from the job was that it offers things which I value. Apart from negotiating
salary/compensation I started looking at other aspects of a job which were important to me.
Things like signing bonus, timing, contractual terms, training and skill development and
extracurricular opportunities at job.

As I was having a hard time figuring out which job will be right for me, I called up the HR
executive at Mahindra where I eventually took the job. One of the things I stressed over the
phone was that I wanted to know more about the job and its offering as job title and
responsibilities. To this HR executive, Mr. X who lived in another city said he would be in my
town in a week’s time and would love to talk to me when he visits there.

This gave me immense leverage to have all my questions answered in an indirect manner. As I
talked to him about the job responsibilities, I realized that there was much more in store at the
job assignment then I initially anticipated. He described how I will have the opportunity, during
the job, to update on various upcoming technologies through various trainings. He talked about
how important it would be for me to travel across various R&D centres and to customer sites to
get feedback and convey my job findings to others. Maybe this was just trivial information to
him that he shared, but he didn’t realise that this was one of the very attributes I was attracted to.
I always wanted to travel across the country and meet new people, try different cuisines and
explore new places. It did wonders to me in understanding how this job was a fit for me. I had
this dilemma about how much should I share about my other offers. But I remember sharing
specific information the other offers that I might be considering on. Over our discussion he came
to a point where he asked me if there was anything I wanted to know which would help me make
my decision. I told him I wanted more clarity in job compensations and contractual terms, clearly
stating my dissatisfaction with both of them. At this point he came across to me saying that
whatever was offered to me was the best he can offer in his allowance limit. He highlighted that
this was pretty good considering the industry and the other perks and skill development
opportunities the job offered. But he showed his genuine concern to me and told me to look over
the HR manual in detail for the other intricate details of job fringe benefits and performance
based bonuses. With this we closed our meeting with the understanding that I would go through
what was discussed and think about it.

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I returned home and took some rest. Later as I studied the HR Manual for Mahindra, I discovered
that there were large performance based bonuses that were given to employees at the year end;
these were much higher than what was written on my offer letter. It depended on company
performance and after researching the past few years it was evident that the company was
working on high profits and expanding rapidly both in domestic and international markets. Also
it had a strong brand presence in country and abroad. Other thing I noticed was that employees
were offered high allowances during their travel. This was a very positive aspect to look at. I
realised that this would allow me to travel comfortably. At the same time it will give me
opportunity to explore new places apart from work during official visits.

I spoke with various people around my family and friends about this and they all spoke
positively about selecting this job. As I was still debating on accepting the offer with Mahindra, I
called up Mr. X to inform him about the decision. As soon as he picked up the phone, he gave
the information that they had decided to drop off the contractual terms for the job without
changing other offerings from the job. I came under immense pressure to accept the offer I
couldn’t reject. I finally ended up joining job No, 3 at Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd.

As I look back to this situation, I see many positives aspects of accepting that job, by
understanding what the job had to offer. Also the knowledge and skill acquired at this firm in last
three years are proof of my decision. The agreement point for the job that was reached at offer
acceptance time seemed to be good enough for me to join the firm. This wasn’t really true. I
came to know about it later on that there were other better job options with better features at my
level. I have to also understand that there will always be better options available. I am looking at
this negotiation and trying to understand what could have been different:

The three factors that could have made this deal different, giving me best result are:

1) Figuring out the best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA) and using the
leverage of the BATNA to maximize the deal output. It is especially important to have a
BATNA because this is the option that is likely to be chosen should an agreement not be
reached. I didn’t have a strong BATNA even when I had 3 other different options to
choose from. If I had known a true strength of BATNA back then, I would have tried to
make that option my rival option against the chosen option to get the maximum output

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 from the negotiation. It would have given me an anchoring point in the negotiation where
I could have walked away from the offer 2. It was also important to know the other side’s
BATNA, which if I had known could have been weakened to show the positives I could
offer by accepting the job. In both cases I could have benefitted from the situation
without comprising my position.

2) Being rational in weighing all the options rather than having emotional attachment to one
which I felt Right. This led to role biases1 and some partisan perceptions. I couldn’t
completely grasp the other side’s problem and hence couldn’t influence the
company/executive so that they gave what I wanted from their offer. This created a
convoluted perception that the offer was a fair deal when I accepted it. The perception of
fairness and rationality changed radically after I joined the company and more so now
that I can understand most of the factors that usually go into a complicated negotiation as
this. It can be said that one may know a lot about negotiation, but still may fall prey to
common errors1. The best defence is to stay focused on the right problem that has to be
solved.

3) Preparation is the key to most of the negotiations. I realized this later on after joining my
job when I got know that I didn’t get the best deal in terms of the compensation from the
company. This proves a point that negotiators who set their sight low result in suboptimal
results. This is correct in my case where I went into a negotiation without much
preparation, on market data on salary or on the company compensation for the level of
job in level I was applying at.

As I conclude my analysis, I realize that the above discussion would help me become a better
negotiator. Even though the negotiations didn’t get me the best result, I can say that I managed to
cling to one offer which was right at that time and fair in my perception in those particular
circumstances. I feel that I can take this experience as a lesson learned which I will build my
future negotiations. It is important to note that no two negotiations are identical and hence every
negotiation has different variables and nuances2. This means to remain on top of my game, I
would have to continue learning from my day to day negotiations and reflect on them from time

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to time. Just the same way I am doing now. Also seeking help through reading various
books/articles and from better negotiators to understand my negotiation skills would provide a
different and out side perspective.

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 Reference

1. James K. Sebenius, “Six Habits of Merely Effective Negotiators”, HBR, pg 6-9.

2. Roy J. Lewicki, Bruce Barry, David M. Saunders, “Negotiation”, Sixth Edition, pg 556-
558.

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