What is protocol when negotiating pay through a recruiter?

The recruiter's comment sounds standard to me. I routinely negotiate salary and benefits for candidates who have received offers. Salary negotiations can be touchy, and it helps to have a professional intermediary involved. Of course, employers want to hire employees at the lowest reasonable salary, while you want to maximize your compensation.

You can sound out the recruiter for guidance regarding the top of the range that the employer is willing to pay. The recruiter has some incentive to help you maximize your compensation because her placement fee is driven by your compensation. However, her overriding incentive is to close the deal and see that you accept the employer's offer. So if you would accept a low-ball offer, don't confide that to the recruiter.

Remember that ultimately, the employer is the recruiter's client, so the recruiter's loyalty goes to the employer first. Don't assume that the recruiter is your best friend and confidant. You need to cultivate the impression with her ? and, by extension, with the employer - that you are grateful and very interested but have other options and don't need to accept this job.

Both the recruiter and the employer are nervous that you will decline the offer, and they don't want that to happen. That basically gives them their only motivation to offer you more than the bare minimum in salary.

If you are an experienced negotiator, you know that the best leverage -actually, the only leverage - you have in a salary negotiation is your willingness to walk away. The company has extended you an offer, so its interest is serious, and it wants to win you over. You have power in this negotiation to the extent that you have alternatives.

Are you interviewing elsewhere? Do you have another offer? Are you currently employed in a good job that you like? Would you anticipate a counteroffer from your current employer? Is time on your side, so you can wait for something better?

If the answers are all no, than certainly you can try to push for the highest reasonable salary, but basically you will be bluffing. Evaluate your options and determine what is the lowest offer you are willing to accept.

Finally, don't forget non-salary factors such as benefits and vacation. Find out the employer's hire date eligibility rules for health and 401(k) plans. Many of these plans have monthly or quarterly enrollment, so it could be valuable to you, for example, to request an on-paper start date of the last Friday of the month even if you actually start on the following Monday.

Also, assess your holiday vacation plans. If you start a new job midyear, you may not accrue enough paid days off in time for your summer vacation plans. Bring these factors up in your negotiations once you've gotten a compensation offer you can accept. If the employer is comfortable with the compensation terms, it should be willing to be flexible on these non-salary factors.

A few weeks later, I checked in with Perplexed to see how the situation turned out. Here is her response:

It turned out well; in fact, today was my first day on the job. I was able to effectively leverage another offer that I had with another company, and while the recruiter was not able to negotiate a higher base salary - I was already on the high end of the salary range - I was offered a substantial signing bonus.