Received an offer! Need your thoughts and advice!

Hi guys, 

im kinda new to this but i really dont know what to do with an offer that i've received. 

i have received the following offer:
- 30% increment from my current base (my current base is low AF, lower than market standard). MD told me that they have a firm wide policy where the maximum increment they can give out to a new hire is 30%. Anything above 30% will need approval from several different parties (regional HR, MD, etc) which he said will "make the process more complicated and will definitely take longer". He hinted that he doesnt want to go through all that hassle of having to seek approval. (makes me think that he just doesnt want to go the extra mile for me)

  • he wants me to join ASAP which means i would miss out on my bonus (bonus payout is in April and its quite significant considering how well my team did this year) 

  • he mentioned that if i want to wait for my bonus, he will resume the hiring process. (i feel threatened)

i've ran the numbers on excel and with his current offer of 30% increment, i still wouldnt be able to make back the bonus i lost. 

I'm planning to negotiate and tell him that "I would be more comfortable if we could settle on $xx)". I want to negotiate without losing the offer in the process. 


what do you guys think? what should i say to him? 


Thank a bunch!

 

Honestly, IMO it's pretty indicative of the team if he's not willing to wait just a few months and/or not make you somewhat whole. Any good place I've heard of does at least 1 of the 2. 

At the end of the day you just have to think about the trade-off in comp vs prestige/exit. If you stand to a lose a lot in the short-term, then have a well-defined plan for what you're going to do after this. If the bank you're going to is a simple trade off from lower-ranked BB to mid-ranked BB then it's not worth it. But if you're going from small MM IB to EB, then IMO it would dramatically improve your exits and you should (but then again I would think most good banks would do 1 of the 2 as I mentioned above...)

 
Most Helpful

I don't like this half-assed stuff that you're doing frankly. You have to have conviction in what you're doing. What are your goals? 

If you're doing it for the money then negotiate hard for what you want, and if you don't get it, then you'll be back to where you started - employed and getting that bonus at Q1-end. You can recruit for a different opportunity that will wait for you to get your bonus now, or recruit later. 

If you're doing it to up your profile and job opportunities in the future, then swallow the pill and give up on the frankly minor amount of money you're losing (in the long run, this $50-100K or whatever will not be super meaningful). But maybe you need the liquidity really bad, then it goes back up to my first point. 

There are rarely any situations where you can make everyone happy. This "I would be more comfortable if we can settle on $xx" just irks me by reading it, and I'm sure it will irk your MD when he reads it too. This is IB/PE, not tech. Pay is generally commoditized throughout for what's guaranteed - base salary - with bonuses and equity varying upon performance. You think you're negotiating with your MD but that's false. You're negotiating with yourself on this very binary topic of "I am going to lose my bonus and they are not making me whole. How much do I care?" 

 

Fully agree with the post above. Nobody on here can really tell you what to do without further knowledge of your current company and the prospective firm. You have to make the decision whether you can walk away from the offer or not. It's pretty shitty and definitely indicative of what working on that team is like if the MD is not willing to give a bit either with base or bonus.

I personally would ask him to either bump ur base to make you whole/ buy out your bonus/ delay start date till after bonus. However if this was regional IB to GS/JPM/MS, I'd suck it up and chalk it down to greater prestige and exit opps which outweigh short term monetary value. You need to decide where the value is, but if they are so reluctant to work with you before you even start, I can only imagine what the culture is like on the team - especially with the MD threatening to resume recruiting

 

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