Presented by Women Who Code Silicon Valley Speakers: Zuhayeer Musa and Zaheer Mohiuddin
What is the health of today's job market? How do you navigate a job search when so many companies are going through layoffs and hiring freezes? Can you still negotiate a job offer? What is the state of salary transparency laws?
Join Zuhayeer and Zaheer from Levels.fyi as we discuss these questions and more. We’ll finish this event with an interactive discussion to exchange experiences and tips on navigating your job search!
Topics:
Navigating Layoffs and Today's Market Impact of Salary Transparency Laws Negotiating your Salary Levels.fyi Services Q&A
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For tonight. We have the levels. Dot FYI co founders Zahir Musa and Zahir Mahouden. And I'm going to stop my presentation and give you the host to present. Unless you want me to run your slide deck. No, we can do it. Okay, cool. Thank you Jodi, for the introduction while the hurricanes at the deck. I guess thanks everyone for being here. Excited to host this event alongside woman who code. I guess just show of hands, I saw a lot of folks actually came from Levels FYI. I'm curious how many folks have not heard of Levels Fi before. You can raise your hand or just throw a comment, feel free if there's no responses and that's great in either case. And then just to gauge as well if you can put in the comments how many years of experience you have and if your student also just mentioned that. Just looking for like a rough range of folks just to make sure that we tailor the presentation accordingly. Cool. Yeah. Looks like we have a diverse group of folks. Seems like mostly juniors, although a couple of more senior folks as well. Apologize if I am coughing on the call. I got a little bit of a cold yesterday, so I may be coughing a little bit, but hopefully we'll get to it. Okay, let's see. So to give some backgrounds, so here's going to be joining in a second rejoin to Share screen, but to give you some background levels that FYI is the most accurate site to see salaries and get insight on tech companies. Our mission is to help professionals like all of you make better career decisions. And most people know us for the salary data, although we have a lot of different things on the site, including our community and as well as the services that we offer. So lots going on and we'll do a quick demo of the site to begin with, actually just to share for folks that may not be familiar and then even for folks that are familiar, we're constantly adding new things. So I'll do a very quick demo of what we have going on on the site. Yeah, Jody, can you quickly make me add. Say that again. It says I'm not able to share my screen. Could you I think there's like a permission thing. Okay, let me toggle that. Alright, you should have that now. Sweet. Still seeing it being disabled? Did you say it's disabled? No, I'm seeing it. Cool. Okay, perfect. Cool. All right, let me go to the demo actually. Yeah, let's do it. So if you go to Level to FYI, this is the homepage of the site. We'll do a quick sort of run through what we have to offer here. To start with, I think one of the most, probably the most familiar graphic that we're known for is this leveling chart below. So you'll see all these nice colors here and you're probably wondering what this is if you're not familiar with levels, this is actually how we got our start. We started by just helping people compare career ladders across companies before we even had salary data. What does that mean? So let's say you just recently joined Google out of college. You would be placed at l three level. The level basically just indicates what the scope and responsibilities of your role are. So for example, an l three software engineer typically is just expected to contribute code. They're not necessarily expected to lead a team, they're not expected to mentor others. It's very much so the first level and the equivalent level of Facebook would be essentially like an e three. And what they're showing here is essentially the standard. So if you pull up the standard, you can actually see the definition of the level. And so we'll see here for entry level engineer, the scope and responsibilities are to develop and maintain lower complexity components with some guidance and support from experienced team members. This is typically the new graph level. So essentially every company calls their levels something different, typically. So you can see on the right, salesforce calls the first level associate MPs, and then Microsoft has almost doubled the levels of most of these other companies. So you'll see their level and goes from 59 all the way to like 80. So what is this graphic useful for? So for folks that have several years of experience, that may be, for example, let's say l four or l five at Google or anything beyond people that have years of experience and are already in one of the higher levels, they want to make sure that they're able to go to another company at the same level. And so this chart essentially tries to encapsulate how the levels may compare across different companies based on the scope and responsibilities. It's not based on compensation at all, it's purely based on scope and responsibilities. Compensation can vary quite drastically across companies. So for example, at a start up, you may not be getting paid as much, or the compensation might be in different mixture. And so that doesn't mean that you're not the same seniority, and so the seniority may be the same even if the compensation is different. So if you have questions, by the way, feel free to just pop them in the chat over the course and we'll try to get those answered as well. So that's the leveling graphic. Now you're probably wondering, okay, how do I get to salary data? That's probably the most highest thing that folks come to the site for, as O'Hare was showing. If you click on the leveling, you'll actually see the compensation as well. And we show you the salary based salary stock bonus. So we have the full breakdown of the compensation there, and if you click into it, you can actually see much more rich information about the compensation. And so we'll show you, for example, okay, what's the breakdown of compensation between base stock bonus, what's the salary range? And so we have a nice chart on the right with regards to how the compensation might vary. And then you can even see the individual data points that people submitted, which is quite unique to, I think, our site, where you can actually see all of these different submissions for folks. And we do anonymize it if we don't have as much data for the company. But given this is Google and we have so much data for it already, all of these data points have kind of show the full fidelity of detail, whereas for smaller companies, we might not show the level, for example, or we might not show the location. One question in the chat, or two questions, do you need an account? No, you do not need an account. If you go to www dot levels FII, I'll copy the link in the chat here, you can see kind of everything that we have to offer. And then do we have a comparison for ladders besides software engineering? Yes, we do. We don't have as much, I will say, but we do have product management, data science, a number of different career ladders, and we're constantly adding more every single day, every single week, we're continuing to add more. So chances are, even if we don't have it now, check back on the site later, and hopefully we'll have it for you. Cool. So that's the company page. One more graphic I want to show you. If you go up to the software engineering role page for Google, I think we have a really cool graphic around how compensation changes as you go up the career ladder. So on the left over here, you can see the trajectory chart, and you can see how compensation is increasing as the career ladder goes up. And so at the highest levels, for example, La at Google, they're reaching over a million dollars in compensation per year, which is phenomenal. Now, obviously there aren't very many people that are at this level just to set expectations, but it does show the potential that you have for earnings within this company and within this career path. And on the right, kind of a similar graphic, essentially just showing the range for each level alongside the compensation. Yeah. So one more question that we just got. What is the source of the data, and how do we validate things so people can fill out a form that we have on the site, and essentially, just like all of the crowdsource sites, there's a form that people can fill out to submit their data. How do we maintain accuracy? There's two ways. One is we have a way for people to upload verified documents, like a debt to statement and offer letter and so on and so forth. Not as many people do it's, a small minority of folks that actually will contribute a proof document. But it's enough for us to be able to essentially set an anchor. And we try to ensure that all of our data points revolve around these verified data points. And oftentimes we don't need a ton of verified data to verify compensation at a company. Even if we have a single verified comp at a company, we can figure out what the comp ratio is, which is essentially how companies set pay. They usually set like, hey, we're going to pay 75th of the market percentile or 98th of the market percentile. And using that, we can kind of project that out to other data points. The last way that we collect verify data is also through our negotiation service. So we have a service where we actually help people that have offers negotiate their job offers. We'll talk about this a little bit more later as well. But essentially this is kind of the landing page for the service. It's a guaranteed, it's a money back guarantee. We either help you increase your offer or you get your money back. So it's kind of a no brainer for anyone that has an offer. You get paid more or you get your money back. Pretty simple. And we've had a lot of success with folks negotiating anywhere between 1015 thousand all the way up to even almost a million dollars per year in compensation for people. That's obviously for director VP level of folks, but we've negotiated that kind of all ends of the talent stack. Yeah. And then over here we're looking at the job family page. So if you just search for a role, let's say software engineering, we have a lot of other roles. So you can see like product designer, product manager, data science, et cetera. You can see kind of the median compensation in a particular location. This is right now currently just filtered to the US. On this page actually you can also see the levels for that role. So over here you can see the product manager levels and how they compare different companies. And below this also, you'll get a lot of useful insights into what the top companies are for this role, et cetera. Yeah, one more question that I just got. What phase do we engage the negotiation team? It's best to sign up for the negotiation service as soon as possible once you have kind of completed interviews, or even if you're in the interview process, some people sign up even before they have completed interviews. The reason why it's important to sign up early is because recruiters may ask questions around compensation earlier in the interview process. So recruiters might ask about compensation in the first call they have with you. And so our coaches, all of our coaches are by the way, they're current and former tech recruiters. So these are recruiters from Google, Facebook, we have around 30 or so coaches from all the different tech companies. And our team kind of works together to help ensure that you maximize your offer. And so the earlier we are engaged, the more help that we can have and we can help you avoid mistakes that people often make. Earlier in the funnel, someone was asking to filter by Canada as well. You can filter by different locations on this page, europe, India, whatever it is, you can filter by those different locations. Cool. Yeah, the last thing I want to show is the leaderboard. I kind of love seeing this page. It really just highlights the potential that we have as professionals. Essentially, it is highlighting the top paying this is the leaderboard of the top paying companies. It's not realistic for everyone to be getting into these companies. Some of them require specific skill sets. But it does show what's out there and what the potential is. And there are a lot of companies on this list that are very attainable for everyone, essentially. And so you can see on this list some of the top paying companies, typically the top paying companies tend to be like hedge funds or finance companies. So you'll see citadel and two sigma at the top. But you'll see a lot of other companies recognizable names like Airbnb or Lift, Stripe, Snowflake, number of other names here. And so this is a great page to see what are the top paying companies, how much are they paying for my level, entry level, or all the way up to even principal engineers. And so lots of kind of great information here. Another question just came in the chat. Do you offer data for remote roles? We do. If you search for a location, we show all of the data for that location on the main site. And so that also includes now even if the job is remote, there's still a location where the person is working from. And you can search remote, just filter as down here data points that are remote. But we still want to collect the location where that individual is working from. Because even if a company offers remote working conditions, typically they still will adjust pay based on the location that you're working from. That's not all companies, but a lot of them do, and that's the vast majority of them typically do that today. So that's why we still collect a location. And if you search for a particular location, you can filter by just the remote roles as we have here today. Cool. That's it on the demo. Feel free to ask questions in the chat. Again, we'll jump into the actual presentation now. So, hot topic. Obviously tons of layoffs going on. Market is looking pretty bleak. We're seeing a ton of layoffs across different companies. But at the same time, there are positive signs there are still companies that are hiring. Even though companies are doing layoffs, oftentimes even the same company that is doing a layoff may still be hiring for certain roles. Typically what we see is by the way, layoffs are not just something that happens in poor market conditions. A lot of companies actually in the past have had layoffs yearly. So it's just like a regular thing that every year some percentage of the workforce is being cut. Historically, like Cisco, for example, or even Microsoft in some sense when they had the stack ranking. Companies typically use layoffs as a way to in non sort of poor market conditions. They use it as a way to get rid of low performers. That doesn't mean that everyone that's getting laid off as a low performer, it just means that that's a frequent mechanism which companies use to get rid of essentially low performers. Now, how do you basically try to ensure that you won't be laid off? Well, typically the best performers, obviously most companies will stack when they're doing a layoff. And if you talk to HR folks or essentially managers and so forth, the way that layouts typically happen is they're based on performance, whether or not you know what the market conditions are. So a lot of companies are doing layoffs now. Sometimes they might be just getting rid of entire departments entirely and that won't be based on performance. But if they're not getting rid of entire team entirely, then they're just going to keep the top performers. And so the best way to guard against layoff is ensuring that you're actually a top performer. And so like advice number one in terms of the market, if you're employed right now, if you're worried about layoff, you know, have a frank conversation with your manager or your mentors and try to ensure that you're essentially performing at the top most capacity that you can. Essentially. What are the companies that are hiring? Actually, before I get to that. Now another thing that we see in terms of layoffs is oftentimes junior roles are disproportionately impacted. And this goes even for if a company is still hiring, junior roles tend to be disproportionately impacted. Now, if a company has a choice of hiring a senior candidate versus junior candidate, most companies will choose a senior candidate. Why? Because it only makes sense that they want top contributors, someone that can kind of get up to speed on day zero without having to do any training, essentially. And so, you know, what we'll see is, and we're already seeing this, even companies that are laying off, they may still be hiring senior roles or specific specialized roles, which are traditionally always harder to find to hire. So for example, machine learning or artificial intelligence are very difficult roles to hire and find candidates for. And so a lot of companies, even if they're doing layoffs or hiring freezes, they're still hiring for these roles. And that's another message I want to get across. Even if a company specifies that they're doing a hiring fees, that doesn't always mean that they don't have any roles open. So that's a big kind of fact to kind of keep in mind a lot of companies will have a hiring freeze but will still have certain specialized roles open and sometimes they may still have regular roles open that are just backfill. What backfill means is essentially if a person leaves the team on their own accord without being laid off, the company still needs to hire to maintain kind of a base level of operations and those backfill roles help essentially the company meet those base level of folks needed to actually run the ship. So some companies that are still hiring, for example Duolingo, lots of well funded startups are still hiring. Another class of companies that often is still hiring right now is a lot of non tech companies that aren't as impacted by kind of the market downturn. What we see in the current market is a lot of the tech companies that have or like the traditional tech companies in the sense that they have raised a ton of funding. We're ultra growth mode. Those are the companies that are being impacted the most currently versus companies that were more on a slower growth path or companies that were not growing as fast or have been around for a long time and are very stable. A lot of those companies are actually still hiring. So those are some indicators of where to look for companies that are hiring still. If we go to the next slide, this is just a tweet that we came across the other day, thought it was very relevant. Here is the playbook. There's a person ads in recession, cut spending, this is referring to personal spending, have emergency savings. Again, the second point is around reaching top 25% of performance. Make sure that you're actually performing at work and doing the best that you can and then learn more marketable skills, right? So as I mentioned, there are certain skill sets that are specialized and companies will always continue to hire even if they have a hiring freeze like AI or machine learning or sometimes even DevOps. Why? Because they're just hard to find candidates. So the more you can kind of expand your skill set, the more marketable you will be to two companies. And I'll hand it off to Zahir for searching for jobs. Yeah, cool. I will try to keep this pretty quick for our international folks and east coast folks so that we can get the questions a little bit quicker. But in terms of preparation for a job search, especially if you don't have a job in particular, we want to be able to figure out your finances and how much time you kind of a lot for yourself to actually find a new job. If you were laid off from your role previously, you want to know what the full details of your severance is. You can email HR from your previous company and try to get the full details for what you're eligible for. A lot of companies will even provide reimbursement and kind of compensation for career services. And you can use that to kind of use any service you find to kind of bolster your career. And so just knowing what you have available to you is like the first step and one of the most important steps. And you also want to know, I think you touched on kind of like the savings aspect, how much time do you have to prepare for this job search and actually kind of blend that job? Even if you're out of a job, I think it's very important to take time to define your criteria for what you're looking for. It's tempting to kind of give in to that first opportunity, and it's tempting to just sign any offer that comes your way. But I think it's actually more crucial to actually be selective of a long term fit, especially when you're looking for that next role, when you don't have a role because you don't want to be going into like, a company where they institute layoffs, like, just a couple of weeks after you join again. And so you want to be extra selective in kind of finding the company that is a fit with you, your interests. And also, like, business model, like business metrics and fundamentals are kind of like, aligned and you have a good sense for where the business is headed and their metrics and growth kind of overall. Obviously, one of the first steps to going out for a job is you want to brush up your resume. It's essentially the first impression that you give employers, and so you want to be able to have a good resume that really conveys your experience. A lot of folks that may have gotten laid off or are looking for a job opportunity may have not done so for like, maybe even five to ten years. They're a senior candidate, but they just haven't brushed up the resume or revisited their resume in a number of years. And so you definitely want to go back and ensure that you can bring it up to speed and kind of brush it off so that you actually have something very competitive and something marketable. And we do have a service, I think, here. Touch on this slightly. We have a resume review service. We have a discount code for everyone here today. Friends 20. If you use it at checkout, you get a 20% off there. If you're looking for kind of like a recruiter to be paired with a recruiter and kind of get your resume reviewed, we'll kind of touch on this a little bit more later as well. Next step is kind of you want to focus your search. As I mentioned, I think it's actually imperative at this point to kind of find the companies you're looking for and curate what strong companies you actually want to join, matters of things, and you want to do your due diligence on the business itself. What are the financials, like kind of knowing how much money they have, how much runway a company has. Asking about all of this, like to a recruiter, if you are in the process is also very important. One other thing is you also want to kind of consider, for example, benefits that you may have had previously at a previous company. Like for example, a crucial benefit may be childcare for you or perhaps it could be like a 401 that you have savings for and you have like a match kind of rate for at your previous company. Like ensuring that you have all of that available at your company. We're working at the prospective company that you're looking at, and we are working on a tool to kind of make this a little bit easier to kind of filter by all these kind of criteria so that you can find all the companies that fit the bill for yourself and kind of ensuring that you have this kind of strong lead list, if you will. You also want to create inbound opportunity. It's not just outbound. I think whatever you have for outbound should be focused. Like it should be kind of you selecting the opportunities, but for an inbound opportunity you want to create like a marketable kind of persona or brand for yourself so that companies can kind of land in your inbox and find you. And so a lot of that is adding yourself to like hiring lists, potentially attending events and kind of just doing networking in the physical sense, engaging your network online, so kind of updating your LinkedIn, marking yourself as open to opportunities and so on and so forth. And this is a quick promo for our resume review, but I think we'll get to that later as well. So skip over that and hand it back over to here. Cool. So let's say you've done all of these things. So as I mentioned, you want to focus your outbound, create inbound opportunities. Now you're getting ready to apply and actually interview and negotiate our offer. So what are the kind of things that you can do here? We always suggest applying and kind of reverse order of your preference. Most times what we see is people get really nervous during interviews, which is totally understandable. And you want to kind of get like if you haven't interviewed in a while, oftentimes people will get very nervous for the first few interviews that they do. And so applying from the companies that you may not have on the highest of your preference list helps get rid of those interviews or helps you kind of shine your best for the companies that you care about the most. So that's like one sort of practical tip for how you should maybe order your interviews. Secondly, get referrals. Referrals help a ton for companies. We talk with a lot of recruiters at levels at FYI, both through our coaching team that we have, which are all recruiters, but also just by chatting with folks in the industry. What we hear from recruiters constantly is that they get tons of applicants. A lot of applicants are not qualified for the role. And so it's a pain for the recruiters to actually filter out the inbound applicants. Now that doesn't mean that recruiters are not looking at inbound applications. So if you go to a company website and you apply, there's a big misconception that a lot of like that some ATS, magical ATS is going to filter the resume out and the company is not going to look at it at all. Almost always in most places recruiters will go through every single resume. That doesn't mean they're going to spend a ton of time on the resume, but they are still going to go through all the resumes. And so it's important to make sure that your resume is actually crafted and highlighting kind of the best things that you can and putting your best foot forward. Now referrals help kind of help give some more signal to all of the noisy applicants that companies get. So let's say companies oftentimes will get hundreds of applicants like a day for all their roles, sometimes even thousands or more than that depending on the company. And referrals basically will get processed first in terms of what a company is looking through. It doesn't mean that a referral guarantees you an interview or guarantees you a certain thing. All it means is that hey, you'll be given a little extra attention or you'll be kind of prioritized when companies are going through the list of applicants. And so it certainly, certainly helps a lot. Now how can you get referrals? There's a number of places. One, start with your personal network. If you know someone at a company, or if you know someone that knows someone else at a company, start with them. And even what we find is most people are willing to help. All you have to do is reach out. People are very friendly in terms of oftentimes giving referrals. You just have to kind of put in the effort to reach out to them. And a lot of times I used to use this strategy myself is when I was applying out of colleges, I would just cold email people. I would just find people say apply to, like I remember distinctly applying to salesforce and I found someone random at salesforce which was maybe like second or third degree connection. I just ping them like randomly. I said, hey, I'm applying here, I'm a motivated student, I've done a lot of side projects, yadda yada. I reached out to them and they gave me a referral. And again, they were happy to help. I just had to put in the effort to actually reach out to them. So definitely feel free to kind of leverage that tactic. And then the other thing is invest in yourself, make something oftentimes, especially within. Engineering roles. The best way to highlight your expertise in a domain is the ability, if you have the ability, to build something yourself from scratch. So, for example, let's say you're a backend engineer. Can you build a server from scratch? Maybe throw it up on GitHub? Throw up like a personal project somewhere? Recruiters, hiring managers, they love to see, especially within engineering, if you have products or things that you've built in the past. And it doesn't just apply to engineering, you can apply this to every role. So if you're a marketer, maybe you have a blog where you do a case study of like, five companies that have done marketing. Or if you're a designer, maybe you've taken a company that exists online and you've redesigned it. So, for example, people will often, like, redesign airbnb or redesign other company. If you're a data scientist, maybe you can find, you know, there's lots of data available on the site. Maybe you can take data and run some sort of analysis and put up a blog. It doesn't take a ton of effort. You can do it in like, probably a weekend or something. But it does help show your passion for the field. It shows kind of your expertise in a way that really differentiates you from the hundreds of other applicants that might be applied to the same role. Now, getting into cold emailing. Here's a sample. Sort of email like, hey, I've been following your company for some time. Was excited to see the launch of X product. Looking for my next role. Would love to learn opportunities. This is specifically for reaching out to a recruiter. And you can kind of tailor this to whatever you see fit. This is just an example. It's always best to customize it. So let's say you know someone that knows this person that you're reaching out to. Then you can start with like, hey, looks like we both know John, for example. He's my friend from X or whatever on LinkedIn. It's quite easy to reach out to some of these folks, and even if they're not on LinkedIn, oftentimes you can just search for a person's name, and a lot of times you're able to find their email. And then in terms of the actual recruiting process. Just a quick clarification. The thing on the left is a bad example. Thing on the right is like a better example. And I think you can customize kind of these emails to your will as far as you're willing to go. And as you mentioned, like, finding a connection or warm lead or someone that you have something in common with is just a point of personalization that you can turn these reach out into. Cool. Now, for the actual recruiting process, start as many conversations as you can. It doesn't hurt to apply to more companies. Just one suggestion I'd have is only apply to roles that are actually relevant to you. It doesn't help for most times, like the ETS systems, when you apply to a company, you'll get into their system and recruiters are going to look at your resume and they're going to also think of other roles that they have within the company, even if you apply to just one role. So if you apply to like a million roles that are irrelevant, it doesn't actually help you. In fact, recruiters may get hurt that they're seeing you in like a ton of different roles that are not actually relevant to your experience. Apply to relevant roles. Have conversations with folks at the companies that you want to apply to. Try to start as many as you can. Right? When I was applying for my first jobs, I would literally apply to hundreds of roles, like 100 plus, and I would have a spreadsheet, essentially. Right. It takes effort, it takes a lot of time, but in the end it'll be worth it. Maintain flexibility. If you, for example, have multiple companies that you're interviewing with, you want to make sure that, especially for the purposes of negotiation, that you're kind of timing them around the same time. They don't have to be exact, but ideally, you want the companies to be you want to be interviewing at the companies around the same time. Now, I mentioned earlier that you want to have the companies that you're not as interested in first interviewing with. Those you can have, for example, companies that you're most interested in towards the end of a week that you're doing interviews, whereas the companies that you're not as interested in, you have at the beginning of the week. Right. So you can still pair up the two piece of advice here. But generally the point is you want to make sure that you roughly have time these things together so that you don't want to be in a situation where you have an offer from a company which has some sort of deadline or something. By the way, oftentimes you can negotiate that deadline. Most companies will push back later. But still, you don't want to be in a position where you're kind of waiting for another company while you have an existing offer. So line up interviews and then lastly, negotiate. Obviously, no matter what the role is, no matter what the situation is, always trying to negotiate. And obviously you can go to our site to see what the pay ranges are. And then we also have obviously, our services that can help you do that. Negotiation. Cool. Salary Transparency Laws as most of you know, there have been a lot of new salary transparency legislation. New York City, Colorado, or both locations that are already listing compensation ranges for all their job postings within those areas. California is up next, so starting January 1 next year, we'll start to see compensation ranges there. There are also many other states kind of in the process, legislative process. A lot of states haven't been approved I believe Washington has also kind of passed something preliminary. But regardless, actually even today in California and Washington, if you ask the recruiter for the range of the role, they actually have to provide an answer. So even if they don't have to post it up online right now, if you request it from a recruiter, they still have to provide an answer. And so that's like something you can use as part of a negotiation. Be sure to if they ask you for your competition expectations, ensure you ask your recruiter what the range for the role is and kind of reflect that question back at them. So how is this kind of law actionable? If you're in New York City right now, one of the immediate things you can do is you can go check for your role right now on your company's job postings to see if you fall within the range. If you don't fall within the range, you can probably go have a chat with your manager about that. But even outside of New York, you can use these ranges to extrapolate some information for other metro areas or other locations that your company operates in. For example, we know that New York is kind of probably a higher paying metro area within the US. And so if you were to look at an equivalent metro area like San Francisco, Seattle or perhaps even Austin, you could probably extrapolate some sort of range similar to what's listed in New York. Now. For other locations, you can kind of apply like a percentage discount and kind of extrapolate what the salary range may be for a company in a different area. So even though it is just for New York City or just for Colorado, you can use these salary ranges to kind of extrapolate what would be kind of a reasonable range. Of course, you can also use the data on our site at Level Fry to kind of get multiple data sources and multiple kind of pieces of information to kind of triangulate what you're actually looking for. Now, while these laws are great and they are kind of pushing forward salary transparency, there are some things to be kind of careful of. So for example, these laws only mandate that base salary ranges are made transparent by companies, which means within tech, at least in the tech industry, like you lose out on, for example, stock compensation, bonus compensation. If you're in sales, you lose out on variable based compensation like commission. And so you want to make sure that you are still evaluating total compensation when looking at a specific role. And so just being aware that these ranges are for base salary and that there is significant compensation that could be outside of just the base salary. Once again, you can use our website to really kind of hone in on what the total competition package you are looking for is. But now you have this additional resource to find based value ranges for a company. One other thing to be kind of aware of is you'll notice some of the listings. I think there were some news articles about this, but the ranges can be very wide. And you'll see like some ranges go from seventy k to like $2 billion. And I think for some of these companies, I think it may have just been they weren't prepared to actually reveal their ranges, but for some companies, they might actually have a wide range for a role because job listings can span multiple levels. And so for example, if Facebook were to release kind of like a job posting for a senior software engineer, it might actually include e four, e five, e six, all those three levels into that role. And so the range for the role might actually be super, super wide. But once you actually have an idea for what level you are actually going to go for, you have a much better idea of how constricted the range could actually be. And that's just something to be aware of. All this said, we've kind of touched on the market, we've touched on kind of everything going on. You can still negotiate, and you should always negotiate, because you could still be leaving a lot of money on the table. Well, why should you negotiate? It's estimated that an average an individual in their career loses out on approximately $1.5 million just because they didn't negotiate. And this is because this value compounds over time. If you don't negotiate now, that means your bonus is going to be lower, because if it's a percentage of your base salary, it's just going to be lower overall. It also means that when promotion time comes, or when you get an increase in your salary, it's going to be lower relative to the person who negotiated and may have gotten more. And so it's always to your benefit to try and negotiate. We've seen very, very, very, like, we've actually never really seen any residuements for offers based on negotiation. And if you do, in the rare case you do, like, I think it's more of like a data point for that company. It's very well accepted within the industry that negotiation is something that occurs. And while it is tougher to negotiate in this market, it's still something everyone should do. Now, what are some tactics for negotiating your salary? As I mentioned previously, reflecting questions back is like an important piece of communicating with your recruiter, communicating with your company, and ensuring that you don't answer everything necessarily, but instead give them something to kind of kick the can. Down the road and say, I'll have to review this and get back to you in a few days, and ensuring that you kind of protect your thought process or whatever so that you can kind of get back to them whenever you're ready and you have an answer. Getting competing offers is obviously one of the first things that anyone will tell you having a competing offer will allow you to have leverage when you go to another company because now you have something in hand. You may have a higher salary with this higher offer with this company and that gives them something much more immediately actionable when negotiating nowadays, we also see a lot of questions very early on in the process around compensation expectations. This goes back to the whole reflecting questions back. Always ensure that you kind of ask your recruiter what the compensation range is for the role before you answer that question to the recruiter. They will always try to get the number out of you first, but it's not in your benefit to answer first. Have them answer the question first. Take time to think about it, take time to actually formulate your high anchor or your number and get back to them when it makes sense. And perhaps it may not even make sense at this early of a stage. You want to evaluate if you actually want to join the company first and that's really when you want to actually talk compensation. There are also some very clever tactics you can use. Like for example, if you already do have an offer and you're kind of on your last leg, you can always use this line of hey, I'm ready to sign today if we can get to X number. And so not being afraid to kind of pull that out when you need to and kind of helping your recruiter kind of do their job because at the end of the day, recruiters are trying to close candidates. And so if you're able to kind of make their job easier by getting your name signed on paper and getting an offer signed today, there are opportunities for you to kind of negotiate, not backing down to exploding offers or tight deadlines imposed on you. Nine times out of ten, at least from our experience, we've seen that deadlines are flexible even if they make it seem like, oh, you have to get to us by a decision by Monday or you have to get us a decision by the end of the week. These things are flexible because they have already invested so much time and kind of recruiting you, kind of going through interview process, getting you an offer, losing you as a candidate just because you haven't met a specific deadline isn't necessarily like it's not always the case. It's just like an artificial pressure that companies create to help you to kind of edge you into assigning the offer. We always recommend trying to extend your deadline. Now, this won't always be the case, it won't always be that you can extend the deadline that you actually have and you can significantly kind of extend it. But it is something worth trying to do and it's an easy way to kind of buy time and kind of get your interview process in order where you actually have opportunity to interview with other companies or hear back from other companies before responding back to that respective company. So these are just small things. I think more specifically, when we get to our Q and A session, people have more specific questions that we can kind of more tactfully kind of help answer. But these are some general things we've kind of always mentioned and I think could be helpful. Of course we have our services that we mentioned, we have our Saudi Negotiation service which has the guarantee a resume review service which we have like a 20% discount code for use the discount code friends 20 to get a discount. And we also have a career coaching service where you can pair with kind of industry experts or individuals who are already in industry on certain career paths and kind of get here directly from them about their kind of career trajectories and kind of how they've gone about kind of preparing for interviews or kind of like even promotions within a company and anything really related to your career. And you can kind of book this one on one time with those coaches directly. Cool. Last thing that we wanted to mention about Level Start FYI is we have a community that we've recently launched where industry insiders talk about anything related from your career to just ongoings within kind of tech or within like specific companies and really just anything going on. And we have a lot of folks kind of discussing how to go about crafting your resume or how to go about kind of with an interview process and there's a lot of valuable discussions on there. And everyone here, we actually do have it under a wait list today, so it's not accessible to the public, but everyone here at the event today gets access to the community. Just email us at hello at Levels FYI and we'll get you an invite. Actually, I'll place a link in the chat here. Okay. Yeah, we'll have an invite link pasted. And how are we doing on time? I think we're doing well. It's 615. Cool. Okay. Questions? Yeah, I was actually going to go through the community just very quickly just to show people what it looks like. It'll be interesting to see. It seems like I was logged out. This is request to increase font size, by the way. Let's do that. So this is our community. This is where you can kind of see different posts by different people on different things going on, like restarting an application, interview tips, hiring status, kind of all this information. Yes. Like a few days ago we even had a post about navigating layoffs and it got a lot of attention, which is really cool. It was like a pretty indepth post about how to navigate a job search in today's environment and it had a lot of kind of actionable advice on what to do, how to go about it and kind of managing the emotional roller coaster of it as well. And so, you know, there's like, a lot of discussion going on here, a lot of community members kind of discussing different things. So just a brief kind of overview of the community and, you know, happy to kind of extend the invite. So I think Zahir has dropped the link in the chat for anyone willing to join. Cool. Yeah. With that, we can go into Q and A also, if anyone is interested in sharing their experience, whether it's through a recent job interview or kind of preparing for a new job, any career tips, pointers, negotiation experiences, whether you've been laid off before and have anything to share, feel free to kind of chime in. And we want this to be kind of like not just us talking, but the community really benefiting everyone altogether. I can start by sharing. My name is Zana. I work in Silicon Valley. The answer to the question of what your salary is, I was told, is to never, ever give a number. Say, I have faith that you will compensate me in a competitive manner. Let them give you it's the same as what you're saying. Let them give you the range. You ask for the range, but then you still don't give a number. And the reason for that is because I was told the offer will always come as 15% over what your current salary? I'm sorry, I forgot. That is the question of what is your current salary? You never give your current salary because they will always offer you ten to 15% over your current salary. So you just don't give your current salary. Yeah, I think we share a similar kind of viewpoint in that you should just never even say the first number, not even your current like, I would venture to say, like, even outside of your current salary, you shouldn't even say any number because you just don't know what the range for the role is unless you kind of have insider info. But most of the time you are at an information disadvantage compared to the recruiter. And so you want to get as you want to glean as much information as possible from the recruiter and the company first before you give an informed decision for what the number is for you. And sometimes this is very early on in the process, and perhaps it doesn't even make sense to discuss numbers if you're not strongly constrained that opportunity even. But yeah, I think totally agree. Hi. My name is Aishwarya. So I have a question how to get a number. If you have taken a break from work for like, four months, how do you give a range to them? And they ask, what's your expectation? Yeah, first thing I would recommend doing is asking the company what the competition range is for the role. Sometimes you will get pushback on this question, so they'll ask hey, we'd be willing to share once we get an idea for what your expectations are. But you should stay kind of firm and just trying to kind of get that question answered from the company side first. Let's say they ultimately don't even answer that question. If you're in a meeting and you're completely unprepared, it's not in your interest to say any number. So what we would rather like have you do is kick the can down the road and say, hey, I haven't really thought much about it. Let me get back to you after I give it some more thought and perhaps you can add in like, let me take the weekend to kind of discuss it with my family or my mentors before kind of before reaching back out. I think it's important to kind of take your time. You don't have to answer a question on a call just because they asked it. You're just shooting yourself in the foot if you lowball like a number or say something that's uninformed. But once you have the time to actually get informed using a site like Levels FYI or kind of getting as much information as possible and creating kind of like what we call a high anchor. And so basically you want to be able to create a number that would be a high anchor. So in case you slip a number or you have to slip a number in a call, you slip this number that you've already kind of well researched and have gotten some information on so that you know that this is like an attainable but like firm number that you would be comfortable with. And so that requires doing some research. But this is only for like situations where you've really absolutely been cornered and they are looking for a specific value. But even before you get to that stage, it's important that you ask all the questions first. Ask for the compensation range, kind of kick the can down the road as far as possible so that you don't ever have to kind of get to that point until you are really at that offer stage. Thank you. I think we had a few questions in the chat. Maybe we can read them aloud and answer them out. Yeah, I answered a few in the comments as well. Cool. Some new ones coming in. I could try an answer. So, process of mathematically new roles. What did I track? How many different company contacts did you reach out to? In terms of company contacts, as many as I could get my hands on or find. The things that I was just tracking is like, the company I applied to the role and essentially the status of the application. It was more so for my own sake just to make sure I was organized and able to kind of follow up on any companies. On subject of hiring yes, if you're hiring, please share your company here. If you're a recruiting manager, by the way, please reach out to us as well at levels that fi. We have some packages or things for recruiters as well as companies as well. So if you're hiring, let us know and we can also offline discuss some of the packages that we have for companies. Another question here. What are tips for negotiating or raise that current company? How does it differ from negotiating a salary at a new company? It's pretty different actually. Negotiating raise that current company is typically much more difficult. Oftentimes what we see is people will get a competing offer to try and negotiate a raise even if they don't get a competing offer. Almost having like an indirect conversation with your manager around how the market has kind of increased in pay and where you fall and kind of coming with some data oftentimes helps. And you can even reference things like, hey, I have a couple of friends that got offers that are higher. Typically the way I would structure that conversation is more so around, hey, I really love it here, I love the kind of the work I'm doing and things. Although I have been noticing that the pay around us has been increasing. A lot of my friends that are looking for jobs or just got jobs have gotten significantly higher comp than I have and I wanted to check to see if there's anything that we can do. Again, I love my role here and I wouldn't want to search for a new opportunity, but I am concerned that my comp is falling behind the market, essentially. So the reason why I would generally shy away from coming with a competing offer and then showing it to your manager, that's a very forceful it kind of escalates the situation, like, really high versus I would start very casual around, hey, I love the work that I'm doing here, but I'm seeing everyone around me get paid a lot more than me. How can we get me back up to what the current market is paying? It keeps it very soft, but at the same time it's direct around like, you know, the manager is going to hear you loud and clear that like, your compensation is not meeting your expectations and it's on them as long as to take the next steps. And if they don't reply or whatever, I would bring it up, follow it up one or two more times. If nothing happens after that, then I think that's a sign that you may have to actually just find other offers at different companies and either switch companies or use that as more significant leverage, like threatening to leave. But generally you don't want to use that as like the first step. That's kind of like a last step. I have a question please. How does Level the FYI make money? Yeah, so we make money from the services that we provide. So as you saw, we have the negotiation service, the mentorship service, and the resume reviewing service. So we have a number of services that help folks like you essentially move up their careers or negotiate offers or improve their resumes. And we do a lot of these or we don't do a lot, but we do some of these workshops, essentially. And oftentimes it's like general advice, and a lot of people are okay with that, but at the same time, some people would want personalized help, essentially. And all of our services are one on one with typically the resume review and the negotiation service. Those are one on ones with tech recruiters. These are people that know inside out how to negotiate pay or how to improve your resume. And so if you'd like that personalized kind of one on one advice and details kind of review on your specific situations, definitely leverage the services that we have. Yeah. And once again, like the negotiation service, for example, it is outcome driven, so if we don't get you an increase, you get your money back. So whenever you have an offer, it doesn't hurt. And I've linked to some of the outcomes that we've received before. This is like an experienced recruiter. So we also have just to give you a sense of kind of the services, we have a team of over 50 coaches today. So we have coaches from kind of all over kind of bringing a knowledge set for their company and kind of any companies that they're familiar with to kind of level start FYI. And all of our coaches are kind of communicating with each other constantly, and they have a good idea for how the market works and where we have, like, where candidates have leverage for negotiation and kind of how to approach those conversations. Yeah. And so I think our negotiation service is easily one of the most impressive, like, even for me, like, to kind of go and see some of the things that our coaches have done is just very kind of amazing to see the actual raw numbers there. Yeah. I would just copy out with the negotiation service is for we don't support new grads, essentially. And the reason is the new grad offers tend to be much more standardized. So we don't support new grads or internal company negotiations, for example, like negotiating a raise. Like, we don't support that. We only support essentially if you have over one or two years of experience, those are the cases that we would be able to support. Our resume review service is open to kind of everyone, regardless of experience level. If you already have an offer, is it already too late to start the negotiating service? If you've already negotiated, it may be too late, but if you haven't started, like, the negotiation process, even if you've got an offer, you can sign up. I have a question on the service for recruiters. Is there a time frame that you have? Let's. Say you have a year max until you find a job, or is it like, until you actually do find a job, they'll help you out? Yeah. Our services, it has a three month timeline. So within that three months, wherever you're interviewing or whatever offers you get, our coach is going to help you through with until you get, like, a signed offer or until the three month expires, essentially. So we offer like a three month kind of window. Cool, thanks. And a follow up to that, zahir is how responsive are the coaches or the navigation coaches? So if I start around, would I be able to contract with somebody within, say, a few days if I needed? Yeah, we have availability as early as tomorrow if you were to sign up even today. So you can go to the site. If you click on book time, you get a calendar with the times that our coaches are available. Once you're assigned to a coach, you basically have email access to kind of contact with them as you're getting updates throughout your time period of three months. And you also get additional calls so you can kind of get on the phone with them if you want to discuss, like, again after initial call. If you feel the need, you can kind of get on subsequent calls and then have kind of email chain conversations with them as you go. All right, thanks. There was a question about job market forecast for 2023. 2024. I think it's an interesting question. I don't think anyone can predict, but just personally speaking, I think the beginning of the year will be quite painful. We'll see a lot less companies hiring in Q One and Q Two, and I would imagine in, like, Q Three. Q Four is when things start picking up again. It's still kind of early days of the recession. And so I imagine that Q One, Q Two would be kind of like bearing the brunt of it. That said, in terms of, like, layoffs and things, I do expect to see, like, layoffs continue into, like, Q One, potentially into Q Two. But I would hope that the brunt of it, the worst of it, will end by essentially Q Three or Q Four of next year. So it is going to be a rough year. But at the same time, I would imagine end of 2023, early 2024, things should start picking up. Most recessions historically, in terms of the time that they last, we're talking on the scale of months, anywhere between nine and 18 months, essentially. So you can think about it as like a year to year and a half, just depending on the charts online where you can kind of see this sort of stuff. But generally that's what I would be looking at in terms of hiring. Cool. If that's it, then maybe we can close. If you weren't able to get your questions answered today, here we have a chat feature on the website. If you go to www dot levels FYI there's a chat box there where you can live chat with someone from our team. It is monitored by some folks on our team and you can also mentioned that you were on the call here today and be happy to take a look at any questions on there. Yeah, absolutely. And also we have the community invite. I don't know if you can repeat the links here, but if you join the community feel free to post on there as well. We're kind of routinely means of here kind of routinely kind of scoping around the community as well and we kind of hop in wherever we can to kind of help get questions answered. So if you didn't get a chance today, feel free to throw it on the community and you can get the full kind of experience of everyone who's within the community to kind of help you. Yeah, I just posted that link again in the chat and I'll also paste the discount code for the resident review service. If you forget, feel free to just mention it in the live chat that we have on the site and someone will help you out with what the code is, I believe. How long does it last there, by the way? I don't I'm not actually sure. Okay. I think it might be like a week or I guess a month. So yeah, just keep that in mind. Thank you Zahir and Zahir for this event. It's very informative and I think everybody will benefit from this information. Yeah, no, thank you for having us. Thanks for hosting. I think this is our third time actually, so it's kind of cool. Thanks for having us back. Great. Take care, have a good night or day, wherever you are. Yeah, thanks everyone. Goodnight everyone.