In the Fall of 2019, I received two job offers on the same day. 

I was ecstatic. 

My heart was pounding, I couldn’t stop smiling, and my ego was about to inflate because I thought I was the luckiest person in the world. 

It was 10 a.m in the morning when I received a call from Lila, a recruiter I had been working with, who informed me that I got a job offer as a Customer Support Specialist from the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). 

At first, she was congratulating me and telling me how happy she was for me, but then she started pushing me to accept the offer. Here’s a post I wrote about how to deal with pushy recruiters. 

Now, at this time I was also working with another recruiter (let’s call her Mia) from Aerotek. I was currently in the process of applying for a position as a Document Control Specialist at a company called Baxter. I left Mia a voicemail and told her about the offer from RBC and that I’d like to retract my application from Baxter. 

Lo and behold, Mia called me back within five minutes and asked about the job offer and the pay. 

Then all of sudden, she asked me, “If Baxter were to offer you, say, $25/hr, would you still be interested?”

At this point, I paused because the offer here was $7 more than the original offer.

Now, I like Mia, don’t get me wrong. She’s super helpful, understanding, and accommodating the whole time I have been with Aerotek. 

“Um yeah…duh!” I thought to myself. But being the stupid person that I was, I told her, “Um…no I don’t think so.”

Then Mia asked, “Well, I understand if you want to take the other offer. But I just think it will be beneficial to take a look at all the options before making a decision, don’t you think?”

Now here’s the interesting part. 

Two weeks ago, I had emailed Mia to see if Baxter would be able to offer more than $18/hour for the Document Control Specialist role, but she told me that the hiring manager would not budge. 

Now that I have this job offer as leverage, all of a sudden it sounded like Mia was willing to advocate for me.

This was not surprising, to say the least. After all, recruiters receive a commission for successfully placing people into a job. In this post, I touch on that point.   

Now, here’s my helpful tip: When you are applying to multiple jobs, use the first job offer you get as leverage to negotiate a higher salary at the other job. This is not new advice, but people still do not do this. 

As someone who is just starting out in her career, I’ve tried negotiating and failed (look forward to this article; it’s coming soon).

As a fledgling, and as many of you still are, we don’t have a strong foundation of networks or connections to utilize in the job search process. But even so, there is still something we can do to negotiate our salaries: using one offer as leverage to negotiate a higher salary from another company. 

In the end, I ended up going to the interview with Baxter but got ghosted. I received the offer from RBS, but rejected it. 

Instead, I accepted an offer from a third party, which is my current company. The best part? It comes with a full-time offer, great benefits, an amazing boss, and super friendly coworkers.

Moral of the article? When companies want you, they will do what they can to keep you. But if not, what you can do is use an offer from one company to leverage the other company to give you a better offer.

Have you ever used this tactic before? How did it go? I’d love to learn more so comment below!