So, my name is Kim Swartz, and I work in the central Career Center located in Barnes Hall, and my role there is I'm one of the associate directors, and I manage the employer relations at the university level. I'm joined today by my colleague, Kayleigh Bermudez, and I'll let Kayleigh introduce herself as well. Yeah, hello. Thanks for joining us this afternoon. I'm Kayleigh Bermudez I work also in the Central career center Office with Kim Swartz. I am the Employer Relations Program assistant. I'm happy to join and discuss some job offer considerations and negotiations. Thanks, Kayleigh. Couple of things situated here and we'll get right started. We think by now, I could get Zoom to do what I wanted it to do. Getting close. I spoke to soon. There we go. Okay. Let's get started here. All right. So first of all, let's talk a little bit about learning outcomes. So what we hope to have all of you learn today is to gain an understanding of the job offer landscaped, to provide a framework for making decisions and learn about resources and tools that can help you. I like to start our workshops with this career development cycle. Apologies to all of you who were on the earlier session. This may sound really familiar to you. Again, we like to start our workshops with this career development cycle, which really does define the way we approach career support at Cornell University. Our career development cycle is a circular process, It involves understanding yourself, exploring your options, and taking action. It's useful for you to know which section of the career development cycle you're in when you're engaging with us, and the job offer negotiation process is certainly in the take action part of the cycle. It's taking action by possibly negotiating an offer, accepting or declining a job offer. You'll be most successful at this stage if you've gone through some steps to understand yourself, do a little bit of introspection to think about, you know, what are your interests, your values, your strengths, And, you know, what are your goals? Is this job going to be a good fit for you if you accept the offer or not, and you declined the offer? As well as the exploring options section, you've checked in with people you trust about the offer, friends, family, faculty, career advisors. It could be other folks that are part of that advisory circle of trusted folks that you talk to about important decisions in your life About the offering. A little tongue tie. You've checked in with people you trust, about the offer and engage in some activities that might help you decide if you will accept using some of our resources that are available to you. So you may decide to accept, negotiate, or decline a job offer. All of this helps you prepare for that decision that you're going to want to make. This slide shows shares with you the NACE career readiness competencies. So NACE is the National Association of Colleges and Employers, professional organization that Cornell University belongs to. So myself and all of my colleagues in Cornell Career Services and our career network, we all belong to this professional organization. Here you can think about, why would you want to understand these readiness, competencies? It's a great way to talk about transferable skills during an interview or maybe to think about your transferable skills that make you worth more money when you negotiate, helps you get a promotion or whatever that might look like for you. Transferable skills being things like teamwork, group assignments, challenges you face and overcame leadership experience or experiences, relative experiences that can be paid or unpaid. And as we think about these competencies and how we might speak about how we meet or exceed these different areas, remember to be honest, don't overstate where you are in these competencies, but be sure to take credit as well. We find sometimes that Cornell students, don't take full credit for where they really are in some of their strengths. So we have something called the career development toolkit. If you're a returning student to the university. Hopefully you've already been able to utilize a career development toolkit. If you're just joining the university, ether as a first year student, graduate student, or transfer student. This is all students are auto enrolled in the career development toolkit, found in Canvas. It's very comprehensive. You can go at your own pace. More modules are added frequently, and information to specific modules is updated on a regular basis as well. So if you look here, and these are all of the different module examples. Job offers is where we're going to focus today. So most if not all the information that we're going to chat about today, you can go to the Job offers module to reflect back to look up information. So you don't have to take tons of notes today. It is in this job offers section of the career development toolkit. Before we dig into the rest of the presentation, I thought we might talk about what first comes to mind when you hear the phrase job offer? Do most people think it's acceptable to negotiate a job offer? So when you consider these two questions. If you feel comfortable and you'd like to share your thoughts on either of both of these questions, I think that can get us started. Get us loosened up a little bit. So what first comes to mind when you hear the phrase job offer, or do most people think it's acceptable to negotiate a job offer? Hey, nice. Hey. Is thoughts still coming in. Any other thoughts? Thanks, Kayleigh for making a note about taking questions during the presentation. If we have questions, feel free to throw them in the chat throughout the presentation, and we'll go for about 30 minutes of our presentation and we'll do a robust Q&A for about 15 minutes at the end. Great responses. Thanks everyone for participating. Don't feel like you have to, but if you have a thought about either of these questions, feel free to add that to the chat at any point. Okay. So let's talk about the job offer, will you accept it? Will you not? Will you take one job versus another job? Do you have two different offers? Now that you have an offer what does that process look like for your decision? But first, let's talk a little bit about the actual offer letter. Back in the day, it was snail mail, right? You got a hard copy. Today, primarily sent through e mail or e mail attachments. Some companies have the process connected to their HR management system, and we see that more and more, especially larger firms. So you may have to go to their portal, set up an account, and then once you enter the portal, that's where you'd find your offer letter, and that would be where you would accept or decline and then continue on with an onboarding process if you were going to accept the offer. These are some of the things that you find in the offer letter, things that make sense, right? Job title, starting, salary, bonus, other terms. I think a particular notice is being sure you understand how you're supposed to accept the offer and the date by which you need to accept the offer. If you have questions about your offer letter, certainly contact the hiring manager or the person that has shared who has extended the offer letter to you, or you certainly could make an appointment and come into one of the career centers to ask questions that you might have. Sometimes you might see benefits, policies, procedures, if a background check and or drug test or fingerprinting might be required depending on the type of firm you're joining in on the top of job that you're being considered for. You'll find all of this information in the career development toolkit and job offer module. So remember that's your friend. So you understand the terminology. So if you look into the job offer module in Canvas, all of these terms are more fully defined for you. Students often have questions about what is an exploding offer and what is at will employment. A exploding offer is an offer of employment or compensation terms that is retracted, if not accepted within a very short period of time. You find yourself in this situation. Be sure to connect with one of the career centers, and we certainly can help you through that. Our preference for employer partners and we share it with them is that this is not something that we believe should be part of the offer process for students. At will employment. So this is the definition, if you will. This is the typical employment scenario in the United States. I essentially means that the position is not covered by an agreement that guarantees employment for a specific period of time, if you're a contract employee, or it's not applicable to union positions or contract positions that state otherwise, right? Generally speaking, this is a typical employment scenario in the United States. Basically, the employer or the employee can basically terminate the employment agreement, if you will, at any point. So'll talk a little bit about show me the money. And that's usually I find when I meet with students, one of the first things that students need and want to discuss is salary, signing bonuses, moving expenses, expenses, incentive pay. You know, any and or, all of these could be part of the job offer. When you're thinking about it, is it enough? Is a salary enough? Is a bonus enough, or are all these as enough? Is it competitive? What are the bonus options? Could it be that, you get a $20,000 signing bonus if you sign within one month, and that goes down to $5,000 signing bonus if you know, don't sign until six weeks, wherever that might look like. Think about the cost of living. Where is the job located? We might think about, you know, we could say, What's Ithaca compared to Chicago, relatively the same cost of living? When you think about a place like San Francisco or New York City, going to be maybe as much as three times or more expensive than it would be to live in Ithaca or Chicago. So be thinking about that as you think about, you know, the show me the money, if you will. I think the other thing that not all students are aware of is understanding that there's an overall compensation package, if you will. Part of that is your salary. The other part of that is the employee benefits package, you know. So things like vacation, things like 401K Things like healthcare, dental, those types of insurances, life insurance. So there's an upwards of 40% of your salary or more are considered, you know, part of that benefits package. So that's a portion of the compensation. So you might have be being paid I don't know, $100,000, but to the company, the cost is $140,000 or 150,000 or 130,000, depending what that compensation package looks like. And it may be that you have questions around the employee benefits package. The hiring manager or the person who extended the job offer to you may not have a deep understanding of the benefits package. So you may want to or need to be connected to an HR representative and or benefits staff will likely be best positioned to answer any questions you may have about benefits. And a lot of these are super important. You make sure that you really understand them as you're joining an organization. What are the pros and cons? So let's think beyond show me the money. What are some of the other considerations when deciding to accept a job offer? So who are your colleagues going to be? Age, diversity, considering things like gender, race, ethnicity, interest. Are there communities? Are there employer resource groups, ERGs, if you're not familiar with ERGs, voluntary employee groups, made up of individuals who joined together based on common interest, backgrounds, or demographic factors such as gender, race or ethnicity? Where will you live? Will your job require you to live rurally, in the suburbs, in the city? Where do you want to be? Does your job offer requires you to live in a city when you really want to be in the suburbs or live rurally? Excuse me. How will you get to work? Will you walk? Will you take a train or a subway? Will you commute by car on your own? Will you carpool with other folks? Or will you? Is the job home hub or hybrid? Meaning will you work solely from home, solely from work, which is it? or hybrid? some of each? Do you get to decide this or is the job predetermined to be one of these options? What are your growth opportunities look like? What kind of education, training, or advancements, do you foresee that other people could share with you, the hiring manager, having conversations with other folks that work at the firm or people that you met along the way through the interview process? Let me get to how do I respond to an offer? Do you request an extension? Do you accept an offer with no negotiation at all? Do you indicate interest and open the door for negotiation? Do you accept an offer after negotiation? Do you decline an offer? The career development toolkit job offers and negotiations module You're so like, Oh, how many times could she say that? lots It's super important. It's a great module All this information you're going to find it in the module. So Let's talk a little bit about these different scenarios. So each of these scenarios has a nice sample for you to use whichever one you're following. So if you're going to request an extension, if you go into the career development toolkit, you'll find a nice example of how to do that. It's okay to negotiate. Always be professional and negotiate on facts, not feelings. If you're asking for a higher salary, for example, talk about your experience. Salary data, do some homework. Use the Cornell post grad survey, Use glass door, Use other cost of living calculators, et cetera. But remember, You can't ask for more salary just because you think you're worth more, right? That goes back to negotiating on facts, not feeling. So keep that in mind. And know that you could make an appointment with a career advisor. You can look to those folks who are in your advising circles, so to speak. Is it friends? Is it family? Is it faculty? Is it career office staff? It's a combination of those folks, who can help you think through that and help you reflect on why are you worth so to speak, did you have a previous coop or internship? Do you have extensive coursework in the area? What does that look like for you? The other recommendation is don't negotiate through an e mail. Request a meeting to discuss the job offer. Use an e mail to request the meeting, but then have the meeting to talk about whether you need to request an extension you need longer to think about the offer. Whether you want to indicate interest and open the door for negotiation, whatever that looks like. You can do that in an e mail. And I would just e mail and say, I have a few questions about the job offer. I wonder if we could set up a time to chat, then create that list for yourself so that you can discuss each of those points during your conversation. It's easy to sort of get off on tangents, then find out when you get off the call that Oh, darn, I wish I had asked that question. You only want to take one bite at the apple right. You want to have that one meeting, get all of your questions out there, and then be able to follow back up. Let's see. So let's talk a little bit more about requesting an extension. So why might you want to request an extension? Perhaps you are in the process of interviewing for another position, and you haven't had your final interview yet, or you have had a final interview, but you're waiting for another job offer. It's not unusual for Cornell students to currently have a job offer and be going through the interview process with another company or have a second offer. That's not unusual. We do see that. And so you want to make sure that you have a plan to ask for an extension consideration for an extension. So this employer offer guidelines screenshot. We share this with our employer partners. It's on our website. You actually could see this. And also, I think Kayleigh probably has the link to what we call the student rights and responsibilities. And this exact same grid, if you will, shows up in student rights and responsibilities around applying to jobs and going through the interview process, et cetera. Just clicked my screen off. Okay. There we go back. And so this is helpful. So let's say you have a summer internship that you're currently at. And so if you looked at for a full time offer, written offer extended on or before August 30. So let's say you got your offer today. And you're going through the interview process with another company currently, and you're not going to know that information for a while. You don't think you're going to know it by October 2, right? Or you're hoping to go to a career fair and explore some other opportunities. So our suggested earliest response date for an employer for a written offer extended honor before 8/30/24 is 10/2/24. So you certainly could reach out and politely and professionally ask your recruiter and or hiring manager, letting them know that, you know, my career center, my university has offered guidelines, and I'm wondering if it's possible that instead of having to respond by September 15, if you might consider allowing me to 10/2/24 to make my response. Some employer partners you're like, Oh, sure, we didn't realize that your school had that date, or it could be an employer partner that every offer letter they make to their interns somewhere gets the same response date regardless of school. And then if a student lets them know my school has a suggested response date, they're happy to make adjustments. I think that folks who are on the call today, a lot of you will have very specific questions about extensions and how to ask for them and how long will I need? And certainly make an appointment with a career advisor to talk those through if you need some help with that strategy. I think the other thing is that thinking about whenever you ask for the extension, is it reasonable for you and for the employer partner? Are you going to be able to ask for a four month extension? Probably not, right? But think about how much time do you really need, and we realistically be able to interview with other companies during that time frame, receive an offer, and be able to compare those two offers? And then how will you respond if the employer isn't willing to give you more time. Be prepared for that. They may say, geez, we're really sorry, we just can't do that. Knowing that the employer partner, their goal is to make sure that they hire the students that they're going to need to start the full time opportunity upon graduation. And so they're trying to lock that down. And so because if you say no, they're going to make an offer to someone else. Often times it's about meeting in the middle, if you will. But certainly checking with career services with an advisory coach, if you want assistance working through this process, because it can seem like a bit much, and sometimes you already know the answer. You just need to say it out loud, right? Yeah. We certainly can help and give some suggestions. Okay. Okay. And if you have some questions do you think will be good for the group around this area, feel free to put them in the chat and we'll get to those during our Q&A here. Okay. Here are some useful salary and job offer links. And this information will be made available to you after the presentation. Here's something of interest. So gender pay gap resources. So the gender pay gap does still exist. And so the American Association for University Women, that first link there. They speak to negotiating is one way to shrink the gender pay gap. We do see more men than women who negotiate their job offer. So knowing that that's the case, thinking about that, you know, how this might be a great way for you if you are a woman to reduce that gender pay gap. And I will say, it's totally acceptable to negotiate now. We talked about that a little bit earlier. And one of the things that I recommend to people is when you first join in organization is when you have the most opportunity to increase your salary. After you've joined the organization, then, annual performance appraisals, annual cost of living increases. So the percentage ends up being less unless you actually change positions within the company. And then that's another time where your salary could increase more than it would through an annual salary review process. The other thing that I would say is there are companies out there, firms, employer partners, that all incoming analysts, for example, all start at the same salary. They don't negotiate. It has nothing to do with you. Personally, It's that they're hiring 25 first year analysts to join the firm, and they're going to come from a whole bunch of different universities or maybe they're all come from Cornell or whatever, but they all start at the same salary. So you will bump up against that salaries are not negotiable, has nothing to do with you, but it's okay to politely and professionally ask if there's room for negotiation in that number. And speaking of the career development toolkit and all those different scenarios, let's stop back real quick here. Sorry about that. All of these have great examples in the toolkit about how to start that conversation, how to start that e mail. So that if you're in a situation where you want and or need to negotiate, there's a starting place for you and know that you can come and see us for extra help. You and speaking of that, connecting with career services in Barnes Hall, that's a central career center. We serve all students across the university. Our office is traditionally open Mondy through Friday, 8 to 430. For the next couple of weeks, we're on our summer schedule. So we're open 8 to 430 Monday through Friday. But on Fridays, we are a completely a virtual office. And here's some of the services that we offer, things that you would think that we would offer. Also, you can check out your college career office too because they offer similar services. So you could if you're a CALS student, you could go to the CALS career center, you can come to the Central career center, and that applies to all of the colleges and schools across the university. You have at least two places you can go because you can also come to the central office beyond your college office.