You Can't Negotiate What You Don't Know You're Owed

The Seven Pillars — Issue 12

Hi everyone and welcome to the twelfth issue of The Seven Pillars.

Last week, we talked about how the sector's hiring process rewards people who've optimized for the algorithm rather than the reader. This week, I want to take a step forward in the process and look at what happens when someone actually offers you the job and you have to decide what to say.

When I made the transition from the military and international security policy into the humanitarian world, I didn't know what I was doing. I had for most of my life, I would like to joke, never had a “real” job. From college I went into the military and operated in a world where compensation was entirely structured with little need, or expectation, for negotiation. My rank determined my pay grade and there was no need for me to advocate for myself.

When I walked into the NGO world, with no direct humanitarian experience and an unusual professional background, I didn’t know whether I belonged there or if I could make it. When I was finally offered a job, after many rejections, the feeling of relief dominated any other thoughts of what I was supposed to do. I was grateful just to be hired. I had never negotiated a salary before and I didn’t even know that I should.

I didn't ask for much (I didn’t ask at all, to be honest), and therefore I didn't get much.

I didn’t understand at the time that gratitude and negotiation are not mutually exclusive. Unwittingly, I had created a gap between them was going to cost me in ways I wouldn't fully understand until years later. I had no framework for the conversation I was supposed to be having; I didn't know what a reasonable package looked like. I didn't know because I had never had to know.

The first real lesson I took from that experience had nothing to do with tactics or scripts. It was simpler and more uncomfortable than that: you cannot negotiate for something you don't know you're owed.

Remember when the news was about what happened, not how to feel about it? 1440's Daily Digest is bringing that back. Every morning, they sift through 100+ sources to deliver a concise, unbiased briefing — no pundits, no paywalls, no politics. Just the facts, all in five minutes. For free.

Read the newsletter trusted by 4.5 million fact-seekers.

Salary is the number everyone focuses on because it's the number on the offer letter. In my experience, it’s also the least interesting part of the conversation. The full value of a compensation package has, for me, often been 2-3 times larger than the base salary alone.

Consider what a full international package can actually contain besides the base salary: a housing allowance, school tuition coverage for children, a hardship or danger pay supplement, employer-paid health insurance, home leave flights, a settling-in allowance, relocation costs, and sometimes a vehicle or transport allowance. Not every organization offers all of these. Not every role qualifies for all of them even within organizations that do. But the point is that there is an architecture here, and most of us walked into our first or second offer negotiation have never seen the blueprint.

When I negotiated my first humanitarian role, I focused entirely on the salary line. And I didn't know to ask about relocation costs because I was already posted in the region. (What I didn't understand was that being already abroad was not a reason for an organization to pay less, it was simply a logistical convenience for them).

There's also a category of employment that exists in this sector which I'll call the gray zone, and which caused me genuine financial harm before I understood what it was. Some organizations classify international staff hired locally (i.e., people who are already in-country when recruited) differently from international staff who are sent from abroad from their home country. The salary may be higher than local national rates, which can feel like a generous accommodation. But it often comes without the housing allowance, school fees, home leave, and other package elements that would accompany a standard international posting. The result is a compensation structure that looks internationally competitive in isolation and isn't, once you calculate what's missing.

If you are currently in a negotiation, or expect to be soon, the single most useful thing you can do before that conversation is build a complete inventory of what you're being offered across every dimension and then research what comparable roles at comparable organizations include.

The humanitarian sector developed its negotiation culture during a period when a certain kind of professional could afford to treat the question of compensation as secondary. When aid budgets were expanding, when positions were multiplying, when the implicit promise of the sector was that meaningful work would always be available to people committed enough to find it. In that environment, pushing hard on salary felt almost beside the point. The culture rewarded people who seemed motivated by mission over money, and it indirectly punished people who seemed too focused on what they were getting rather than what they were giving.

That atmosphere produced norms that are still governing behavior right now, even though the conditions that generated them have collapsed. Those of us who accepted flat offers without negotiating and who felt embarrassed to push back were following rules that made a certain kind of sense once, in a sector with a different financial reality.

There’s another element that went into the construction of this dynamic, and that’s social class. For many decades, and especially for international staff, the world of non-profit work and international development was the remit of a group of people with a specific background. Most came from middle or upper-middle class backgrounds, had attended good schools, and had a network of financial and social support behind them. This wasn’t, by any means, everyone. But those who really were putting mission over money (because they could) set the tone for everyone else, regardless of financial need.

I want to be careful here not to suggest that everyone in this sector was ever insulated from financial pressure, because that has never been true. Local national staff have always operated under compensation structures that international staff rarely examined closely enough, and the dual salary system in international development is one of the sector's most uncomfortable conversations. But even among international staff, the experience of genuine financial precarity. As the sector has professionalized, we’ve come to need the salary to actually work.

The norms may be changing; or at least they need to change.

Some organizations in this sector have addressed the anxiety of negotiation by removing it entirely. They publish their salary scales and they make pay grades publicly available. The logic, well intentioned, is that transparency produces equity, and in several meaningful ways, it does. It removes from the equation a particular person’s comfort with and ability to negotiate, which has nothing to do with quality of work.

But flat, transparent bands create their own distortions. The band doesn't see the difference between two people at the same grade whose actual experience levels differ substantially. It doesn't reward an additional graduate degree, or ten years of field experience in contexts that most people in the role haven't navigated.

The negotiating leverage in a band system shifts from salary to everything else. Grade level becomes the primary lever. Being classified at the correct level for your experience is worth more than any individual salary adjustment, and it's worth pushing for before you accept an offer rather than after. The timing and structure of salary reviews, step increases within a band, and the specific allowances attached to your classification are all worth understanding explicitly, because in a system designed for equity, the remaining variables matter more than they appear to.

There is a particular cruelty to the way compensation compounds over a career, and it operates so quietly that most people don't recognize it until they're deep enough in that unwinding it feels impossible.

That was me.

When you accepted that first offer you established a number. That number became your salary history. And your salary history, in a negotiation for your next role, functions less like a data point and more like a constraint, because in most compensation negotiations your new salary should bear a reasonable relationship to your old one. A meaningful jump requires justification.

Further compounding that problem is that you may establish your salary history at an NGO that emphasizes things other than the salary line in your benefits package. The fact that you get full housing and school fees and everything else covered means you probably got a lower relative base salary. But it’s not the whole package value that becomes your history; it’s only the base salary.

We all know that our salary history doesn't record what we are worth. It records what we accepted, under whatever circumstances were operating at that time, including our level of experience, our desperation, our ignorance of the package architecture, our gratitude at being considered at all. If those circumstances produced a number that was lower than it should have been, that number follows us. It compounds in reverse. Every subsequent offer that anchors to your history is an offer that inherits the original undervaluation, and over a long enough career the cumulative cost becomes huge.

This isn't fair. The practice of using salary history as a negotiating anchor benefits employers and converts a candidate's past circumstances into present leverage for the organization. Several places have recognized this and enacted salary history bans or laws that prohibit employers from asking about previous compensation. Several US states, including California, New York, and Massachusetts, have these protections, as do a growing number of jurisdictions within the European Union. If you're job searching where these protections exist, or even applying to an organization based in one of these places, you are legally entitled to decline to share your salary history.

The practical response is to anchor the conversation to market value rather than personal history whenever possible. That means doing genuine research and not guessing or taking your previous salary and adding a percentage. You have to do a little digging to find out what comparable roles at other organizations are actually paying. Devex salary surveys, the UN's compensation data for affiliate organizations, and direct conversations with people in your network who've recently been through similar negotiations are imperfect sources, but they are better than the alternative. When you're asked about expectations, the most defensible answer is a range grounded in that research, with a brief explanation of how you arrived at it. “Based on my research into comparable roles, I'm looking at a range of X to Y.”

What I've come to believe, after enough expensive lessons, is that the reframing of the salary negotiation should be about tactics.

It's about a fundamental understanding of what you're being asked to sign. You’re negotiating a contract that specifies what you will deliver and what you will receive in exchange, and it will govern your professional life for the duration of that engagement. Reading it carefully, understanding each element, and asking questions about the parts you don't understand isn't aggression, it’s being a responsible adult. The organization's HR department negotiates compensation terms professionally, on behalf of the organization, every day. You are allowed to bring the same level of attention to the conversation on your own behalf.

You are also allowed to take time. Asking for twenty-four or forty-eight hours to review an offer before responding is standard practice in every professional context. In the humanitarian sector, where offers can sometimes feel like they carry an unspoken expiration date, that pause can feel uncomfortable. Take it anyway. You will not lose a legitimate offer by asking for a day to think.

And if the answer to a specific request is genuinely no (for example, if the salary band is fixed or if there's no budget for a relocation allowance) that's useful information too. A transparent “no” tells you something real about the organization's constraints and its flexibility. You can make a fully informed decision from there.

I left money on the table in my first humanitarian role because I didn't know there was money on the table. I was grateful to be there, I was new to the sector, and nobody handed me a map of what a reasonable package looked like or told me which elements were worth asking about. That combination of ignorance and gratitude cost me in ways that compounded for longer than I'd like to admit.

The sector's norms around negotiation were built during years when many people could absorb that cost without noticing it too acutely. It was also, unknowingly, built by people who could absorb those financial costs. That period is over for a lot of us, and for some it was never true to begin with. What hasn't changed is the culture those years produced: a faint sense that pushing for more is somehow at odds with why you're here.

It isn't. Knowing what you're worth and asking for it clearly is what allows you to stay in this work for the long term, to weather the gaps, to say no to bad contracts while you wait for good ones.

Has there been a moment in your career when you realized (maybe too late) that you'd left something significant on the table during a contract negotiation? What did you wish you'd known to ask?

Hit reply and tell me the story.

See you next week,

Anthony Pusatory

Founder, The Seven Pillars