How to sabotage your salary negotiations efforts before you even start

By Aline Lerner | Published: August 22, 2023; Last updated: April 29, 2026

Note: If you're interviewing with Meta, also read our Meta-specific negotiation post. Meta has a very specific and predictive negotiation style, and if you don't know how it works, you're probably going to leave $150k on the table.

At interviewing.io, we’ve coached hundreds of people through salary negotiation. We’re good at it — our average user gets $50k more in cash, and we have a 94% success rate.

Having done this a lot, we’ve seen our users make the same two mistakes, over and over, BEFORE they start working with us. These mistakes are costly and make it harder for us to do our jobs. Our advice is applicable to everyone, but I wrote this post primarily to share with interviewing.io’s user base, so that future clients of our negotiation service don’t shoot themselves in the foot.

These are the two things you must avoid. Both involve how you talk to recruiters at the start of your job search, way before there’s an offer:

1. Revealing information too early in the game
2. Negotiating before you’re ready

In this post, I’ll explain why these two mistakes routinely sabotage salary negotiation efforts and what to say to recruiters instead. In a nutshell, if you can just be in “passive information gathering” mode (more on that later) for most of your recruiter interactions, you’ll be golden. It’s hard to not to share info about your job search with your recruiter, especially as you build more rapport with them, but we’ll tell you exactly what to say instead.

Before we get into all of that, I want to go over two foundational things about negotiation.

1. Recruiters are not your friend, and they don't work for you.
2. What negotiation is and what it’s not

Recruiters are not your friend, and they don’t work for you

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

-Upton Sinclair

I used to be a recruiter. I ran my own agency, and I also worked in-house before starting interviewing.io. That means that I’ve had to struggle with the tangled incentive structure that comes with being a recruiter (see the section called “You should write down your principles”). There’s always a tension — recruiters are, by and large, good human beings who genuinely want to help their candidates, but they also have an employer they’re beholden to, as well as a comp/bonus structure that rewards certain behaviors, some of which run counter to candidates’ best interests.

There’s some distinction between in-house recruiters and third-party recruiters (recruiters who work for an agency that does placement, rather than a specific company that’s hiring engineers).

Third party recruiters

My general policy with third-party recruiters is to not tell them ANYTHING and to always deal directly with the companies they introduce you to, once you establish a point of contact there. You should assume that anything you tell your recruiter is going to get back to every company you’re working with. Why? Because their primary objective is to place your butt in the seat of one of the companies they’re working with, and they will do whatever they need to do to make the deal happen. Often, those things will run counter to your interests.

A big misconception that many candidates labor under is the idea that because third-party recruiters get paid every time they make a placement, their interests are fundamentally aligned. At a high level, this is kind of true, but once you dig into the details you'll see a lot of nuance.

A recruiter, depending on market conditions, gets anywhere from 8%-25% of the candidate’s base salary when they make a placement. In the current climate, it’s around 10%. However, that cut is going to the recruiting agency as a whole rather than to the individual recruiter — you will almost always end up working with large agencies rather than a sole-proprietor shop where the owner gets to take all of it home.

Let's say that you get an offer with a base salary of $150,000. You talk to your third-party recruiter and tell them that you would like more money. The recruiter may go to the hiring manager and try to advocate for you, but they're not going to push very hard because the incremental difference in their cut is going to be pretty small and to them the thing that matters most is getting butts in seats. After all, they're evaluated on the number of hires they make, first and foremost, independent of comp. Understanding that, let's do the math anyway. Say that they’re able to risk closing the deal and get you $165k. Before, the agency would have gotten paid $15k. Now the agency gets paid $16.5k. That incremental $1.5k isn’t worth risking a deal over (even a few thousand dollars would not justify jeopardizing the deal). On top of that, the individual recruiter is only going to maybe get a few hundred dollars total from that increase. So for them the difference really isn’t worth it. Third party recruiters are incentivized to get the deal done, not to risk the deal by negotiating hard for you.

Moreover, because they’re incentivized to get the deal done, you should assume that your recruiter will share anything you share with them with the company or companies they’ve introduced you to. If you tell them that a company is your first choice and that you’re tempted to accept, they will likely share that with the company and may even recommend that they not raise your comp, since you’re already so enthusiastic. If you share that you’re not very interested in a company, and the recruiter has other candidates they’re presenting, they will prioritize those candidates’ experience over yours and will possibly tell the company not to invest in you as hard.

In-house recruiters

What about in-house recruiters? In-house recruiters may or may not get a bonus for hires that happen on their watch; it depends on the company. But if they do, that bonus is generally NOT tied to your compensation, and in some cases, they may get a bigger bonus if they’re able to negotiate you down. At big companies, in particular, in-house recruiters follow a playbook. They’re trained to make offers within specific bands, and they’re trained to mobilize such that they don’t lose candidates to other big companies — if you wave a Facebook counteroffer in front of Google, they will act. If you tell them you’re interviewing at a startup, they will not, because they know that startups don’t pay as much. They’re actually evaluated on how well they follow the playbook. Because of that, there is no reason to assume that their incentives align with yours. They’re incentivized, first and foremost, to follow the rules their head of department sets for them. This is true for how they evaluate candidates, who they let through, and how they read resumes. And it’s definitely true for how they negotiate.

If you’re interested in peeking behind the curtain on how recruiters think, I interviewed three of the best ones in the industry recently.

I’ll close this section the way I began it. Recruiters want to help, and many are rooting for their candidates. But they’re also operating inside a box, and that box isn’t set up to put your interests first.

What negotiation is and what it’s not

Probably because of bad books and airplane magazine ads (for those of you old enough to remember those), people often think that negotiation is all about saying the right thing, or how firm your handshake is, or any other amount of silly nonsense. The reality is that negotiation is all about preparation and leverage.

Preparation and leverage means doing the work to make sure that you have multiple offers, that all your offers come in at the same time, and that you don’t tip your hand too early. Laying this foundation is 80% of the work. You’ll need to slow some companies down, speed some companies up, and hold off questions from recruiters until you’re ready to negotiate, and not before. If you do this right, the actual negotiation part will be easy and almost a foregone conclusion.

Is it possible to negotiate when you don’t have multiple offers and when you haven’t done the foundational work? Sure, it is, and we’ve sometimes had success with our users doing that. But it’s much harder, and the ceiling on how much more money you can get is lower.

With all that out the way, let’s talk about how the two biggest mistakes people make and how to not make them!

Mistake #1: Revealing information before you’re ready to negotiate

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Exactly what to say

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Conclusion

I said it in the beginning, and I’ll say it again. Negotiation isn’t about saying the right thing. It’s about laying a foundation: not revealing anything until you’re ready to negotiate, not negotiating too early, and making sure that you’ve set yourself up to have multiple offers.

Then, once those offers come in, you swoop in with sharp precision, negotiate once (possibly with just your top choice company), and be done with it.