Have you ever used the following prompt in artificial intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT: “Please tell me the average salary for a [your job title and the industry you work for] in [your city and state or metro area]”?
You may be surprised at what you find. You may discover you’re being significantly underpaid, by as much as $45,000, or even more.
You don’t need the fancier, paid version of ChatGPT to get a good, detailed response about average salary. The unpaid version, which you can download to use on your phone for free, works just fine.
The system will pull the information it uses to provide that average salary from sources such as Salary.com, Glassdoor, and Payscale. It will tell you how estimates from these different sources vary, along with factors such as experience level and size of company that impact how much you should be paid.
Job candidates for open positions in your organizations increasingly are going to enter salary negotiations with average salary information generated by ChatGPT or one of the other AI readily available to people today.
What do you do when the employee pulls up a screen on their phone showing the average salary people in the position they were offered are paid?
The incredibly wide spectrum of information available from consumer-friendly AI stands to transform salary negotiations in favor of job candidates. What used to take much more effort to collect, condense, and analyze now is as easy as spending a few seconds to type in a prompt/information request into the chat box of an AI app. Then another few seconds to copy the information and send it to a boss, hiring manager, or Human Resources associate.
Prepared for AI-Informed Salary Negotiations?
With such illuminating and easy-to-access information, it’s harder to low-ball employees to maximize your company’s savings and profit on an employee’s work output.
When I got my first job offer for a full-time job in my mid-twenties, and a Human Resources associate called to give me the news, I was operating in the dark. It was February 2003, and though I could have done research on what I should be paid, it would have required a concerted effort. I hadn’t thought ahead to doing that research, so I would be ready when the call came in.
Instead, I nearly accepted a salary that was more than $2,000 a year less than the company was willing to pay. The HR rep, most likely out of pity and compassion, enlightened me and told me the company was authorized to go up a couple thousand dollars for that position. It is likely the company could have stretched even more if I had bothered to do my research and ask.
Are your hiring managers and HR associates ready to answer job candidate questions about why the salary they were offered is significantly lower than the average salary for their prospective position?
It’s Easy to Find Perks and Benefits, Too
Salary is just the beginning. A prospective or existing employee can use AI to ask what is reasonable to expect in benefits for their position based on what others in the same role in other organizations are getting.
What if you’re offering just two weeks of vacation time, and the employee or job candidate can show you, based on AI-collected data, that most people in other organizations in the same role get three to four weeks of paid time off (PTO)?
It can work similarly with benefits such as paid maternity leave. I once experienced working for a company that appeared to offer just two weeks of paid maternity leave. The employee would have to use their two to three weeks of vacation time on top of the maternity leave’s two weeks to be able to spend a paid full month at home with their new baby.
Today, that employee could go into the HR office and present information, with sources cited, showing how much more paid maternity leave organizations of a comparable size offer.
What if You Can’t Match Average Salary and Benefits?
Hiring managers and HR associates must be armed ahead of negotiations with verifiable information, based on statistics culled from their own use of AI or other objective sources of information, to defend the offered salary and benefits.
They must have a data-based response when the employee or candidate provides evidence of what they should be paid and the benefits package that should go along with the job.
Then they should be ready to argue why the employee should still join (or stay with) their organization, even if they could get better pay and benefits someplace else.
Are you training your hiring managers and HR associates to respond to AI-collected and synthesized information about average salary and benefits?