Lina Moon.

Knowing how to negotiate salary is an important skill for university students about to graduate and join the workforce. Research has shown that people who negotiate are more likely to increase their salary, resulting in long-term benefits over the course of their career.

Through competitive research, we learned that available resources for people to improve their salary negotiation skills were mainly content-based with little interactive practice, or were only offered in-person, limited by accessibility and affordability.

We saw an opportunity to evaluate how graduating university students learn about and handle salary negotiations, and create a better experience adapted to their needs.

I served as the project lead, keeping everyone on track for deadlines, organizing documents, providing guidance, and reviewing materials.

I also recruited participants, led interviews, created personas, analyzed surveys, and teased out implications from findings.

Context

Many Americans don’t negotiate their salary even when they have the opportunity—in 2018, Robert Half found that only 39% of American workers negotiated their salary during their last job offer.

University students and recent graduates are even more prone to not negotiate at all. Nerdwallet found that 62% of recent graduates didn’t negotiate their salary at all, even though 84% of employers said they had room to bump up the offer. Experts say this is likely because students are not confident or underprepared for such situations.

Opportunity

How might we help university students and recent graduates improve their salary negotiation skills?

Objectives

• Understand the needs of university students and recent graduates in negotiating a salary
• Explore and analyze  opportunities for improvement in the space
  
• Evaluate concepts for testing, refinement, and evolution
  

Competitive Analysis

To understand what learning opportunities were currently available for our audience, we conducted a competitive analysis of public resources related to salary negotiation.

We found that resources meant to help people hone their salary negotiation skills exist in 3 main forms. While in-person workshops or personal coaches are great for interactive learning, they can be limited by accessibility or price; other resources, while more accessible due to being online, are usually purely content-based and offer little in the way of actual conversational practice.

Observations

We began our primary research with scenario-based observations in order to understand the basic behaviors of salary negotiators before, during, and after a negotiation.

We recruited 8 participants to complete 2 activities via Zoom:

• We observed participants when they were asked what they would do if they wanted to learn about negotiating their salary
  
• We then asked participants to take part in a roleplay negotiation, with the researcher acting as employer and participant acting as employee
  

We transcribed these interviews and used the AEIOU framework to affinitize and pull out relevant themes.

Interviews

To understand people’s personal experiences negotiating, we conducted interviews with 9 participants who had negotiated a salary before, probing into their thoughts and feelings.

We transcribed these interviews, and conducted qualitative analysis through open and systematic coding. We then created an affinity diagram of our codes, pulling out salient themes and adding to our findings and themes from the observations.

Survey

Finally, we conducted a survey via Qualtrics to take a quantitative look at people’s experiences negotiating salary, with questions related to our emerging themes.

We received a total of 52 responses, with the following demographics:

• Ages between 20-70, with mean age of 33
  
• 62% female, 38% male
  
• 45% were pursuing their bachelor’s, while 34% their master’s
  

We synthesized survey findings with those from our observation and interviews.

Analysis

We identified the 3 following major themes from our research: salary research, personal background, and negotiation practice.

Personas

We also identified several key characteristics of our participants to create key spectrums, which we then used to draft archetypes:

Design Principles

When discussing implications for a potential product to help develop salary negotiation skills, we came to the following conclusions:

• Factor in my experience and background
  
• Help me to anticipate the other party and know what to say
  
• Help me leverage salary and job information

From our principles, we were then able to ideate potential features for a product targeting each of the personas that we had created.

We decided to target the novice persona as the focus of our product—an experienced negotiator further in their career might opt to pursue options such as personal coaching, while less experienced individuals are likely to pursue easily available public resources.

Sketching & Testing Round #1

After our ideation, we began to sketch out ideas of what the features above could look like, from getting salary recommendations to practicing negotiation roleplays.

We tested our concepts with a few potential users to see if they would understand the concept and take interest in such an app.

As brief examples, we found users:

• Understood that the app suggests what your salary range would be, based on what it pulls from LinkedIn and the introductory questions
  
• Understood that the practice feature was a step-by-step process, where you’ll start the conversation, and "if they say this and you go this way"
• Thought that compared to other resources for salary negotiation, such as salary. comparison sites, this was more "focused on you"
• Were more interested in practicing with another person than just receiving advice from another person
  

Prototyping & Testing Round #2

After validation of our concept, we began creating mid-fidelity wireframes and made revisions based on the user feedback.

One major revision we made was incorporating a feature to practice with a partner, as opposed to submitting videos for feedback and advice from other users.

Experience

The final experience consisted of 4 key flows, as follows:

• Onboarding: Users connect with their LinkedIn profile, or enter information about their background, education, skills, and experience separately to receive recommendations on their target salary based on their individual profile.
  
• Learning: Users can view their recommended salary target, along with what background, skills, and education they can use as leverage points during their negotiation. They can view articles and videos on how they can use these leverage points in their negotiation. On the Learn screen, users can go through an introductory course on the basics of salary negotiation.
• Practicing: Users can practice negotiating by themselves through a roleplay feature that displays prompts on the screen, or choose to practice negotiating with a partner and schedule a time to be matched.
• Reviewing: After practicing, users can review their session, rate their confidence level, and take notes for improvement. They can track their confidence level over time and view their notes in their practice history.