Sign-on Bonuses
Sign-on bonuses are the low hanging fruit of compensation negotiation. You can easily earn a few thousand dollars by playing your cards right.
We'll cover the following...
Sign-on bonuses are commonly offered by companies to make-up for any unvested stocks or upcoming bonuses a candidate may be leaving behind. The sign-on is an opportunity for a candidate to negotiate hard with an employer for more cash. Some companies have standard offers for sign-on bonuses, while others are more flexible. Offers from the latter kind can vary widely in range for the sign-on component of the offer. In most instances, the recruiter will ask for evidence to justify the sign-on bonus.
Some will even ask you to provide them with the screen-shots of unvested stocks in online brokerages so that they can present it to their compensation committees to buttress the case for a higher sign-on bonus.
Here is an anecdote from our time in the valley: Silvia, a friend, was working at Oracle and had an offer from Salesforce. She requested the recruiter for a sign-on bonus and was immediately met with the question of why she would need one if she weren’t leaving behind ...