Job Offer – What’s your Bottom Line?

You’ve sent countless resumes, spoken with too many recruiters and have had your fair share of interviews. Now you have a job offer, but do you know what you’re worth and do you have a “bottom line”? You need to know both, what you are worth in the current job market (please see my post Are you paid what you’re worth?) as well as your “bottom line” (defined as the lowest salary, benefits and other perks at which you would accept an offer and not feel as if you are under selling yourself). Today’s post will cover some tools you can use to help evaluate a job offer.

Spin Strategy’s SidebySide™ – Spin Strategy (www.spinstrategy.com) offers an Excel spreadsheet tool to help you evaluate an offer. The first tab helps evaluate the job quality while the second tab helps evaluate quantitative aspects of the job.
How to Evaluate an Offer – This article, from Salary.com, provides some of the basics for evaluating a job offer. Titles, Salary, Bonus, Benefits, Perks, Vacation Time and Start Date. Don’t forget, everything can be negoitiated (see I got a job offer, now what? – Negotiating a Job Offer), but you need to know your bottom line.
Get insider salary and benefits information – This web page, provided by Vault.com, is jam packed with information. There are salary surveys from actual companies followed by salary and compensation chartes by profession. Lastly, there are links to functional job salaries (such as Accounting or Health Care). You may need to be a Vault member to see some of this information.
The Riley Guide – There are several sources of information you can review from the Riley Guide:
- Salary Guides & Guidance – Provides excellent links to Salary and Compensation guides as well as links to evalutating salary data.
- JobStar Central Profession-Specific Salary Surveys – “Links to over 300 free online salary surveys” is part of the tagline for this site (provided by www.jobstar.org). Each functional link leads to a list of several salary surveys for that profession.