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Handling Salary Questions in an Interview

What if I can't dodge the salary question?

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Karen Chopra
Licensed Professional Counselor
www.ChopraCareers.com  
 

Karen James Chopra, LPC, MCC, NCC, has been counseling career clients since 1999 and has helped hundreds of clients change careers, find new jobs and deal more effectively with workplace challenges.

In addition to her private practice, she has worked for two national corporate outplacement firms: Lee Hecht Harrison and Resource Careers. These are the organizations that help people who have experienced a layoff or downsizing to find new jobs, and their programs are usually considered the gold-standard of job search technique.

Ms Chopra is a regular presenter on career issues, having taught career theory at the graduate level, designed and delivered numerous workshops, and served as a regular guest commentator on WMAL’s career radio show “Your Career Life.”

She is a career-changer herself. Before entering the counseling field, she worked for nearly a decade as a trade negotiator for the United States Government, first at the Department of Commerce and then at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Ms. Chopra holds a number of relevant licenses and certifications: licensed professional counselor (LPC) in the District of Columbia; Master Career Counselor (MCC), a designation of the National Career Development Association (NCDA); and National Certified Counselor (NCC), a designation of the National Board of Certified Counselors (NBCC).  She belongs to all of the relevant national and local associations involved in career counseling, including the American Counseling Association (ACA),  the National Employment Counselors Association (NECA), the National Career Development Association (NCDA) and the Washington Metropolitan Area Career-Life Planning Network (MAC-LPN).

Her B.A. is from the University of Virginia, and she received a masters of science in foreign service from Georgetown University, and a masters in community counseling from George Washington University.

What if I can't dodge the salary question?

 

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Host: What if I can't dodge the salary question?

Karen Chopra: If you can't dodge the salary question, be ready with a very broad range of what you have made over the last five or six years, in terms of compensation. So what we're looking for is not what your salary was but what your total compensation was. When you take it back five years ago, and you strip out everything but your base, and you say well in recent years my compensation has ranged from and you start with that low number and then you take your most recent job or your highest paying job and all the bonuses and all the benefits and anything else towards the reimbursement whatever they have tossed on top and you put all that on and you give that as the top of your range.

What you are looking for by giving a range of compensation is the sort of bracket, what it is that they are going to be offering for this position. Full credit for that particular answer goes to John Lucht, who has written a great book on career search called 'Rites of Passage at $100000 to $ 1 Million', and this is his recommendation for how to handle that and I think it's probably the best way. If you just can't dodge the question, give him a range, give him a really big range and hope you bracket it whatever they are offering in the middle of it.

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