How this 24-year-old negotiated her first job offer over email—and got $33,000 more

 Samantha Lenger is just a few years into her career but has always negotiated her salary. She boosted the compensation package of her very first job out of college by more than $30,000, and she didn’t even do it in person.

“You can totally negotiate over email,” Lenger, 24, tells CNBC Make It, and doing so can take the stress and anxiety out of the conversation.

Here’s how she did it.

How to negotiate over email

Lenger was just a few weeks into her senior year of college studying business at North Carolina State University when she landed two job offers at the same time.

She was drawn to one company, but the other was offering a little bit more in total compensation, so she got to work figuring out how to put herself in the best position.

Lenger drafted a message to the recruiter at her top-choice company reiterating why she wanted to join the team. Then she transparently laid out the better offer: “I said, ‘I’m super excited and really appreciate the offer but have one at a similar company offering XYZ’ — which was basically a bigger sign-on bonus and larger overall package — ‘Can you meet me there?’”

By writing it all out clearly, Lenger could negotiate different parts of the offer package at once.

Samantha Lenger has negotiated several job offers over email and says she’s even hired people who’ve used the same method.

Alexa Blazevich

If you don’t have a competing offer to benchmark your higher numbers, Lenger says you can find that information through online pay databases like LinkedIn or Glassdoor. Even better, ask your network. When Lenger was weighing her options, she asked friends getting offers in the same field about the ranges they were seeing. She also tapped a few people in her network who were about one to three years into their careers.

It could also be a good time to see if anything is negotiable beyond base salary, like potential bonuses, wellness or work-from-home stipends, paid time off, or your start date.

In Lenger’s case, once she fired off her email, the recruiter responded that they would take her request to the hiring team and get back to her.

A week later, the recruiter responded with a significant bump: a $10,000 boost to the salary, a $5,000 sign-on bonus, and more stock options that all amounted to a roughly $33,000 larger compensation package from the original offer.

What she wishes she knew earlier

Lenger now works as a freelance marketer and negotiates with clients and vendors on behalf of her own business all the time.

She’s also been a hiring manager and once hired a candidate who used a similar technique of negotiating for more money through email. From her hiring experience, Lenger learned it’s generally easier to approve one-time pay bumps, like a sign-on bonus or relocation assistance, rather than getting a significant salary increase.

If there’s anything she wishes she knew earlier, Lenger says, it would be to fully comprehend how much people expect you to negotiate. “Even though I had mentors who told me to, I thought I was coming out of left field” when making the requests, she says.

“Anyone in the hiring game expects people to negotiate or at least doesn’t think it’s out of the question” to do so, Lenger adds. She encourages young workers to feel empowered to do their research and negotiate pay based on the current market. Worker leverage may not be as strong today as in recent years, but the market is still overall favorable for job candidates.

As far as negotiating with hiring teams, Lenger says, “It’s not like they’ve never seen this before.”