S1|Ep96 Salary Negotiations 2.0: The Future of Human Capital in the Age of AI

Hello and welcome to Digital Transformation and AI for Humans with your host Annie. In this podcast, we delve into how technology intersects with leadership, innovation, and most importantly, the human spirit. Each episode features visionary leaders who understand that at the heart of success is the human touch, nurturing a winning mindset, fostering emotional intelligence, and building resilient teams. My brilliant guest today is John Gates from Oregon, United States, an internationally recognized corporate executive, pay negotiation coach, and best-selling author known as your salary coach.

A true expert redefining what it means to know your worth and claim it in the age of intelligence. With decades of executive experience in global recruitment and talent strategy for Fortune 500 companies, John has helped countless professionals and business leaders navigate one of the most critical frontiers of our time. As the founder of Salary Coach Academy, John equips six and seven-figure earners with the tools to negotiate better, smarter, and more confidently, bridging human potential and data-driven insights to create outcomes where value meets integrity.

Today, we will explore salary negotiations to all the future of human capital in the age of AI, uncovering how algorithms are quietly reshaping the balance of power in pay decisions, what leaders must unlearn to stay relevant, and how mindset and emotional intelligence remain the ultimate differentiators in an increasingly automated world. I'm honored to welcome John to the studio. Welcome, John. It's such a pleasure to have you here today.

Thanks so much, Emmy. It is my pleasure to be here, and I'm so excited about our conversation. We always have such good chats whenever we're together, and this is going to be no exception. The audience today is in for a treat, and I'm excited about our exchange.

So am I, and I couldn't agree more. It's always amazing vibes when we are discussing the common trends and whatever is on our table. And today we are ready to unpack what is going to be super valuable for our listeners and viewers. Let's start the conversation and transform not just our technologies, but our ways of thinking and leading.

If you are interested in connecting or collaborating, you can find more information in the description. And don't forget to subscribe for more powerful episodes. If you are a leader, business owner or investor ready to adapt, thrive, and lead with clarity, purpose, and wisdom in the era of AI, I would love to invite you to learn more about AI Game Changers Club, a global elite club for visionary trailblazers and change makers shaping the future. You can apply at AIGamechangers.

Could you tell us some about you? Oh, sure. So for those listening, I have been a corporate recruiter for a long time, since before the internet was really a thing. So I can still remember getting resumes in envelopes with stamps on them.

In response to advertisements that I ran in newspapers and trade publications, print ads, right, were the way of getting it. And if I ran an ad, I'd be lucky to get 10 or 12 responses. And so I had a filing cabinet full of resumes that were roughly sorted by function. So I had engineers in one folder and administrative assistants in another folder.

That's about as granular as my sorting and filing and system got in those days. I was a recruiter for six or seven years before I ever saw my first applicant tracking system. And if you've interviewed for a job recently or applied for a role, you know what applicant tracking systems are. That's where you go and apply and you fill out all the application online.

And there's a lot of technology sifting and sorting that stuff behind the scenes today. So eventually I became the head of global recruiting for multiple Fortune 500s. Over the course of time, I emerged as a pay negotiation expert and was running point. I was the point negotiator on all executive hiring.

And over the course of my career, I personally oversaw or indirectly oversaw through my team at least 75,000 job offers over my 30-year career in corporate recruiting. Some time ago, I started consulting on the recruiting process. And about four years ago, I launched Salary Coach as a way of helping six and seven-figure earners to negotiate their pay, mostly when they're moving from one job to another job, because that's when you have the most leverage and can make the most easy change to your pay package.

Executives have a lot of opportunity to do this. And, you know, C-suite people are often leaving six figures on the table and they don't even know they're doing that. So I love this new direction in my life that's been salary coach. I'm kind of like the prosecutor who's become the defense attorney because I used to be the one on the other side of the negotiating table seeing what I could get you to accept.

And now I'm helping you to navigate the minefield. So you maximize that offer without putting it at risk. And that's a little something about me. Yeah, when I first kind of stumbled into this, Emmy, when I was interviewing for a job at Capital One Financial in 1998.

I lived in Oregon at the time where I live now, and I was being interviewed by Capital One for a significant job in their IT recruiting function. And they're based in Virginia. So it's Virginia is about as far from Oregon as you can get and still be in the United States. So it was a big deal, a big move for me and my family.

But Capital One is famous for being highly selective about who they hire. If they interview 10 people, they will only offer, you know, only one person is going to be eligible to receive an offer. They'll decline the other nine. That's their human capital strategy.

So I went out there to interview in 1998 and I finished this intense interview process, which is all about behavioral competencies and written assessments and a whiteboard exercise where I had to get up on a whiteboard and do math calculations and decide on a course of action in the business. So I'm sitting in the conference room after that interview in 1998, and in comes the recruiter that is working with me for Capital One. He sits down and he says, John, I'm just going to level with you here.

We we've interviewed 23 people for this job in IT recruiting, and only two have passed the process. You're one of them, and the other guy just withdrew. So what's it going to take to get you to say yes and move to Virginia? And I was thrilled.

Like, I knew I was going to get an offer. I knew it was probably going to be a good offer. I knew I had leverage. But even though I had been a recruiter now for eight years, I really didn't understand how to use the leverage.

And so I said, Well, how about a higher salary like this much? How about we move the incentive up a little bit? I just bought my first house in Oregon. I'm going to have to sell that.

Can you help me with that process? And the answers were, yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.

Yes, we can. He said yes to everything I asked for. And I flew home excited to share the news with the family. And I was, of course, thrilled.

But when all the dust settled, I started wondering how much money I just left on the table. And it itched me. It itched my brain. I mean, I couldn't escape it.

I was now extending offers on behalf of Capital One. And I started seeing the other offers that were going out. And I thought, wow, I kind of blew this opportunity. It could have been so much better.

And from that point on, I started actually tracking how much money people were leaving on the table. And I set a goal to replace my annual salary every month with negotiation savings on behalf of Capital One. This is kind of political self-defense because I didn't want to get laid off again. It'd already been lay off once.

And I wanted to show the company how valuable I was. But in doing this, I started to emerge as the negotiation expert, and they asked me to train the other recruiters and so on. But I really like what I'm doing now a lot more, where I'm working on behalf of employees and job candidates to help them safely get the maximized offer without twisting arms, without putting the offer at risk. So I've developed the salary coach method, which is a proprietary way of negotiating, keeping your nice personality intact.

You don't have to become a jerk. You don't have to change your personality and become this aggressive machine in order to come away with a maximized offer. So I'm having a blast doing what I'm doing, and that's what I've been doing for the last four years. Amazing.

Such an inspiring story. And that's true. We've been from the times where there was no internet through all the history of its development. And here we are discussing the latest news around AI.

And speaking about your story and achievements, I also thought about Elon Musk's 1 trillion pay package. What does this say about the future of value creation, incentives, and fairness in an AI-driven economy? Oh, I love that question. Emmy, Business Insider, called up and asked if they could interview me for that article they were doing on Elon Musk's $1 trillion pay package.

They were looking for a pay negotiation expert. And interestingly, their question was: how does this affect normal people? Like the everyday corporate employee? Should they be following the same strategy that Elon Musk is following in negotiating with Tesla?

Because look, he's about on the verge of getting a $1 trillion pay package. Maybe we can learn something from Elon Musk. And, you know, that was very interesting conversation that I had with the reporter. But my opinion is that Elon Musk is in a unique situation with the Tesla organization.

He is, you know, he's leveraging something that we call key person risk. And if you are a key person, it means you're virtually irreplaceable within the company. So could Tesla part ways with Elon Musk and continue to grow? The answer is yes, but would they grow more aggressively with Elon Musk involved?

I think the answer to that is also yes. So I think that the strategy that Elon used was give me this pay package that I want, or I'm leaving. And that was a legit threat for Elon. I don't think he wants to leave Tesla, but he could.

He's got a number of other businesses, including a growing AI business that he can opt to. He's got all kinds of capital and could start something new that he's passionate about. He has more choices than Tesla does. And that is a creative point of leverage for him.

But if the average person goes into their office and says, pay me more or I'm leaving, the average person is somewhat replaceable. It might be inconvenient, it might be painful, but to be truly irreplaceable, you have to have something that no one else on the planet has, a combination of things. So it's very, very, very risky to go into your boss and say, here's the ultimatum. You give me what I want, or else.

Companies don't like being treated like that. So instead, if you want to grow your pay package with an organization, you need to grow the scope of responsibility that you have, your knowledge, and your impact on the organization. And you have to very carefully and subtly bring in competition in the market for your skills into the conversation. You know, I think it is a huge mistake to go out and interview with somebody else, bring a job offer into your boss's office and say, hey, look, I got this offer for 100,000 euros more, or 100,000 more.

What are you going to do about it? And very often companies will match that, but they match it because they want to control their own situation. They match it because the timing of your departure is not convenient for them. They're in the middle of a big project or something like that.

So they want to retain you for the short term at least. Your loyalty to the organization gets called into question when you do this. So a better strategy would be something like: hey, boss, I just want to let you know over the last three months, I've had four different headhunters call me about different jobs. And I want you to know that for right now, the numbers they're throwing at me are a distraction.

I really like working for you. I like working for here. I'm not looking for something. But uh the numbers are a distraction.

It's coming at me. It's sort of changing the way I see my value showing up in the market. So can you do something? So I'd really love to continue to just hang up the phone when these people called in.

And if you approach it like that, instead of the ultimatum pay me or I leave, it's a lot better received. And that kind of segues into some of the other topics about AI and technology and everything like this. Managing the human elements of pay negotiation is as important now as it's ever been. AI is starting to shape things and change things.

But there's still incredible value in leveraging human responses to human decisions. Things like pride and anxiety and fear, all these things play a role in who gets the job offer, who gets the raise, all that. It is not and probably won't ever be purely a function of an algorithm, how much somebody's going to get paid or who gets promoted. There's too much human emotion involved in those decisions.

And I don't see that changing anytime soon. I couldn't agree more. And thank you so much for sharing that invaluable recommendation, because I'm sure that many have been in that situation. I recognize a similar situation myself.

And it's really good to see it from both ends as an employee and from the end of the HR. John, how is AI reshaping the way organizations access professional worth and make compensation decisions? What are the biggest challenges and opportunities? Great question.

This has been a huge point of discussion over the last two years within the HR function. And AI-driven compensation modeling, I think, is going to accelerate over time. Things like benchmarking and even making compensation recommendations for a promotion or a new hire is going to be AI assisted and modeled. And here's what I think is going to happen more and more.

Humans right now are making compensation recommendations. So let's say, Emmy, you interview with a company and they decide they really love you and they want to hire you. Right now, a recruiter, somebody like me, will sit down with the hiring manager and maybe the compensation team and will say, okay, we want to hire Emmy. How much should the offer be?

And we look at all the information we have gathered through the course of interviews, maybe even your compensation history, if we were allowed by law to gather that information. Some places outlaw that in the decision. But all this goes into a decision-making process, which I think could be AI assisted. But right now, sometimes as a recruiter, I see hiring managers say, oh, we can get Emmy for that.

Let's do that, even though that's 20% below what I think you should be getting in the market. So a human will see an opportunity to lowball you and will take that opportunity to stretch their company's budget or something like this. And we'll ignore the warnings from HR that that will lead to turnover risk later. But I think that an AI will be able to balance more variables in this and optimize the initial pay offer so that the company benefit over the course of the employment relationship is maximized.

Like what I mean by that is let's say a company offers you 20% less than the market would offer you, and you say yes to this. Company says, Woo-hoo, we just got a great deal on Emmy. But in reality, Emmy is always now looking for the next job that's going to pay her fairly. And uh 12 or 14 months from now, uh, Emmy comes into the boss's office and says, I found a better job.

I think it's time for me to go. And now they're back to recruiting again, which is very expensive. And vacancies are expensive. And then you have this learning curve.

Maybe it took you six months to really settle into full productivity in the job. So I think an AI model would be able to take all of this into consideration better than humans and would make an optimized offer recommendation. Now, that doesn't mean that the humans have to accept the recommendation, but they could read through the justification and make a better holistic business decision as a result. So I think that's something that is coming.

Let's see. So yeah, I think AI will be recommending pay packages more and more for recruiters and hiring managers. But yeah, I do think that ideally, like if I could train an AI to do this, it would be optimizing to just to maximize the long-term company value. Now, this could be a two-inch sword, by the way.

If the company decides that low tenure is actually profitable, then um you know, then it could actually make offers that will drive turnover at a certain point. And I don't see that as a great human outcome, but it could happen. It's it's on its way. AI can be used for good or for, you know, not great human outcomes.

Unfortunately. And I absolutely love that you are sharing with us this long-term sustainable approach to running business in a truly human centric way, but it's also becoming a win win situation because the business is going to feel better and grow faster if the turnover is lower. At the same time, practically, not so long time ago, I was running a Masterclass for a room filled with board members, and we were discussing these questions, and one opinion in the room, supported by a few others, was there is a lot of people on the market now.

It's not a problem to lose one star and replace it with another one. So why should we care about it or worry about it? The market is ours. Yes, that is, in my opinion, a short-sighted view of both technology and human capital because of the things I mentioned already.

Ramp up time is a real thing. It takes a knowledge professional six full months really to go from I just got hired here to now I'm fully productive. And if you keep repeating that just because you can, you're losing a tremendous amount of productivity over time. You lose knowledge, you lose momentum on projects, you lose a lot of things.

Very often salaries are the top expense of a company. So when a company says we're having a bad quarter, it's it's time to cut expenses, that's why layoffs happen, because that's the biggest pool of expense to cut from, and so on. So you could take a look and say, well, we could just replace people. It's easy for us to replace people right now.

So that's we should reduce our expenses, make low offers, and as a business model, just keep replacing folks. That churn that can become unhealthy if it's too much. It can become less profitable if it's too much. And I think the profit hits, the overall productivity hits aren't considered in that calculation.

They're just looking at one side, which is how much money do we spend on salaries? And they're not thinking about profit per dollar spent over the course of time and things like this. Great that this conversation is a reminder about what really matters and how recruiters should approach that process to evaluate it in a more sustainable way. Yes, there's one more thing, too, that I'll just add to this.

If these these sorts of economies are cyclical, right now we're in a very soft economy where those conditions are true, where there are lots of job seekers and lots of talent available in the marketplace. One year from now, that could be very different. There could be a massive talent shortage. What happens to your employment brand if it gets out there reputationally, that this is a company that lowballs people and keeps them only short term and lays people off all the time just to maximize efficiency?

That's going to make things very difficult in a more competitive environment, which is sure to come eventually. I couldn't agree more. Great point. What invisible data signals or algorithms are already influencing salary and promotion outcomes, often without employees even realizing it?

Oh, this is an interesting question because it reminds me of Big Brother, you know, from 1984, or the terminated, you know, some of the worst-case ideas, technology controlling our futures, technology controlling who gets what job, technology controlling things. This has kind of been around for a while now, though. I think for the last 15 or 20 years, HR analytics have been around. So before we had LLMs coming on the scene and more intelligent AI, AI agents and so on, we had HR analytics.

We were tracking things in HR. We would track turnover rates, we would track productivity, engagement scores, all that kind of stuff, and try to wrangle that into some information we could use to make decisions about workforces, about teams, about leaders. For example, this leader has high turnover and a low engagement score. That becomes then the trigger for HR to begin investigating what's going on in that group.

Do we need to train that leader? Do we need to replace that leader? Is there something else going on that we need to adjust? Because these problems are expensive for the organization.

So we've been mining data for a long time, and AI now is allowing us to take that data to the next level. And it's a little bit scary, actually. Way back in 2015, 2016, I came across a company called Job Arate, J-O-B-E-R-A-T-E. And it's not around anymore.

I think it was acquired by something else. And I'd be curious to see where this ended up. But back then, even before LLMs, Job Arate was an algorithm that was looking at your employees' public social media activity specifically to determine, to try to predict who was looking for a job and who wasn't. So if you are a company, you could deploy this technology and it would go scrape the web looking for Facebook posts, looking for LinkedIn status changes.

Did somebody just update their LinkedIn profile, for example? Well, it turns out that updating your LinkedIn profile is a strong predictor that you might be thinking about a job change, right? And so on, right? There are all these little indicators that pile up into what they call the J score.

And I can't remember if it was the higher the J score or the lower the J score. Let's just assume it's the higher the J score, the more likely it is that that individual will turn over or leave the organization. This feels like Big Brother looking over your shoulder. You know, now you can take technology like this and you could look at everything they say in a Slack channel.

That the ability to grab all this data that is alive in internal systems and external systems to predict whether or not you're getting ready to leave. But this sort of thing is starting to replace employee engagement surveys, which have been around for a long time. They're somewhat inaccurate, but once a year you'd go out and ask employees, hey, what do you think about working here? Um, what could we improve?

All that kind of stuff. Now, I think that helps with action planning, but this idea of the J-score or something like that really gives them an up-to-the-minute view. Even you can even monitor employee sentiment like on a day-to-day basis. Job seeker tendencies are going up or they're going down, you know, the trend line.

You can look at this and then you can investigate what's going on and make some adjustments and so on. But it is it's a little scary how this technology could be used. I don't know how pervasive this stuff is out there right now. Wish I did know.

I don't think I think companies that are using this are a little bit secretive about it because they don't want employees to feel like they're being spied upon. But like I said, HR analytics has been around for a long time. And now AI is making accessible information that we always wish we had, you know, more available than ever before. Exactly.

And it makes me think as well about my recent participation as a jury member at one of the hackathons around the AI agentic development. And one of those HR cases there was exactly involving scraping data from all over the internet in order to evaluate that candidate. We have to also understand how much of our privacy we would like to keep for ourselves and how far are we going with technologies versus our human-centric approach and uh the human right to keep some kind of independence and human freedom as well untouched.

Yeah, I think that's a wonderful comment, Emmy. And I feel like Europe may be a little ahead of the United States in this area. We may need some regulation in this area so that people don't feel like they have to constantly wear this public-facing mask where they feel like they can have some freedom of expression. But, you know, it is true if you make comments in public-facing social media, employers sometimes look at that as part of their hiring decision process.

And so theoretically, they could still do that even without technical assistance. But this all reminds me a lot of the social credit scoring system in China, which I find to be really troubling. You have to behave and speak in a certain way in order to be acceptable in that, you know, in that machine. So I'm speaking here as an American, and very often Americans are really, you know, we value free speech and freedom of expression and and so on.

So this idea that you have government or an employer or a machine that's going to control your access to jobs, looking at everything that you say or do online, gathering all the data, that doesn't feel quite right. Doesn't sit right. And I think most people probably would align with that idea. Hopefully.

All I can say, hopefully, because sometimes I start doubting that unfortunately, looking around at the latest trends and where everything is moving. John, as AI and automation redefine efficiency, what does real negotiation power look like for leaders and top performers? And what is the secret behind successful salary and benefits negotiations in this new AI-driven landscape? This is a terrific question because I think to some degree the answer is the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Negotiation was never about pure efficiency and metrics. This is something that I call out in my book, Act Your Wage, and also in the teaching and coaching that I do with Salary Coach and the Salary Coach Academy. What I mean by this is hiring decisions are almost never about who does the best job. You've probably seen this personally working in companies, but I've seen it over and over and over again as the recruiting leader who, you know, I put five people into an interview process with a manager, and then I'll call a meeting and I'll say, Who do you want to hire?

And I know from my own screening and interviewing, and I'm an interviewing expert, I know which one is probably the strongest fit, and the one who's going to develop the best solutions and have the pure efficiency metrics impact. And I was surprised more often than not that they pick someone else. Not the obvious, clear, like highest performing person. And so the human elements of decision making here are still alive and well and probably will stay that way.

The fact is that the most qualified person often doesn't get the offer. The person who gets the offer is the person who is the lowest risk to the hiring authority. So people are selfish, self-interested folks. Like if you were if you were a CEO and you were going to hire a new chief financial officer, you could hire the best technical chief financial officer, the one with the best metrics, the one who had the history of moving the finances forward the most.

But really, the one that you're going to pick is the one that's not likely to embarrass you in front of the board. The one that is not likely to be viewed as a hiring mistake. Because no matter what level you are, you're a leader, you're making a hiring decision. The worst thing you can do as a leader is to hire the wrong person.

Because it makes you seem like you don't have good judgment. And that's like the first thing you have to be is good at judging people if you're going to be a leader of people. So if you make a couple of hiring mistakes, people might start to think, well, maybe you shouldn't be in a leadership position. So this pushes people into a very conservative mindset when they're selecting talent.

They want the person who is least likely to be viewed as a hiring mistake. This is why you still hire people that are referred by people you trust. You might even hire your boss's nephew or something because you know that the boss is going to have your back if the nephew screws something up. A lot of hiring decisions start to make sense when you understand that it's a risk reduction process first and foremost.

And then if you have a pool of low-risk people, then you're going to pick the one that is the most efficient and so on. So when you're interviewing for a job, like it's very important to become the lowest risk person, more than the highest performing person, even. Now that's about getting selected. When it comes to maximizing your offer, this is still a little bit subjective.

Objectively, it is about maximum impact in the role. How do you create profits? How do you drive revenue? How do you reduce expenses?

And that is something that you can leverage into a higher pay opportunity. But here's something that's even better than that. And that is if you can figure out what the boss's bonus is based on and be good at delivering those things, they might not even directly relate to the to the, you know, you're smiling, I'm laughing here, because it's true, leaders will spend somebody else's money to make sure that they hit their bonus target. So if the boss's bonus is based on the successful delivery of this giant project, and you are interviewing for a job that's going to have a big impact on that, you know, it doesn't matter as much that you could deliver high profits to the company.

It matters more that you're going to be able to nail that project to the wall. Like that's why all the interview questions are probably focused in that area and so on. So the question is, you know, as AI redefines efficiency, how does that change negotiation landscape? It does to some degree, but really the human elements are still the strongest-weighted piece.

AI, though, is going to be scraping things out of public-facing data, like your resume needs to have a lot of results statements in there. Your LinkedIn profile has to have a lot of results statements, outcomes, measurable stuff. Because I think AI likes that. And if you've got an AI note-taker in a Zoom interview, for example, AI can analyze and dissect everything that you said in that.

So priority one is to understand what the hiring leader really wants in a person personally and be that person. But during the course of an interview, draw the direct line between what you do and how the company performs from a profit perspective, how you affect the financials. And even if you're in a staff function that doesn't drive sales, maybe you make the salespeople better. Maybe you're reducing expenses or reducing risk.

What how does that make or save money for the company? You gotta express this explicitly. And then AI becomes your friend in the process. Exciting.

So many interesting uh highlights and insights. I really appreciate it. And of course, uh there is always the question what's in it for me in this game? And we should keep it in mind more often than we do because it boils down to that simple question quite often.

And I would love to dive a little bit deeper into that. So, how can professionals future proof their worth and secure a long-term success in a market increasingly ruled by intelligent systems and performance analytics? Okay, so when it comes to future proofing, I think that first of all, professionals today need to develop and invest in their own AI fluency. Because we're on this giant learning curve together as a society.

There are people that are ahead of that curve, there are people that are on the curve, and there are people that are behind that curve. And especially for leaders, I think you need to have a strategy for how you're going to learn and implement AI, not just in your own job, but in your organization. So I'm seeing a lot of salary coach clients, executives coming to me and reporting that during interviews, they're being asked, what's your AI strategy? And if you're a leader, let's say go back to the CFO example, the chief financial officer, they are not, you know, it's it's table stakes to say, here's how.

I use AI in my job. Here's how I have implemented it, or it's here's how I am becoming more efficient as a CFO. What they really hope to hear is here's how I have created efficiencies in the whole financial organization with AI and how I've led that effort and done the change management process, doubling down on things like change management. Change management's becoming an even more important leadership competency because of all of this change.

You have to manage the mindsets and the belief systems of all the employees who are afraid if they learn AI that they're going to be replaced by it instead of augmented by it. So I think that companies now are looking for leaders who are going to bring an AI methodology to their teams. And we've now kind of grown past the how are you going to use AI to do your job better. So future proofing, I think, has a lot to do with being a continuous learning person.

You know, you've always got to be learning what's new and how can we do a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more, and on a bigger scale. That's what a lot of employers now are looking for, in my opinion. Very interesting. And you mentioned mindsets.

So we are going to go into that. What are the biggest mindset shifts people need to make to upgrade their salary, benefits, and positioning in this new reality while mitigating the risks of losing opportunities for advancement? At the same time, how can soft skills, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness become a true competitive advantage when negotiating in this AI-shaped environment? The first thing is you should stop fearing automation and technology and instead embrace it.

Make sure that you stop the fear of automation and AI and instead learn to embrace that. So also think of negotiation not just as a one-time event when you are changing jobs or you have some negotiating to do. Negotiation really and positioning your on your pay is like this ongoing career management process. You have to be thinking about your value all of the time.

Even when you're not negotiating, you should be thinking about how does this, how does taking on this assignment improve my value? How can I communicate that value? How can I document that value in my LinkedIn profile in the company systems that I use and stuff like that? So I think shifting out of the annual performance evaluation cycle, once a year I'm going to document this stuff into more of a let's do this on a constant basis is good.

And I think too, another mindset shift here is people believe that loyalty is rewarded. I'm going to say something very controversial here. Loyalty is not actually financially rewarded. Mobility is rewarded more.

And I see this over and over again. Sometimes in some companies, there's a joke that will go around that says, you know, it's I would make more money if I quit, worked somewhere else for two years, and then came back. Because when you're an employee, you're part of the HR policy ecosystem that says, well, if we're going to promote you one level, then we're limited to offering you no more than 7% or something like that. They have policies that apply to employees.

They have fewer policies and fewer curbs that apply to somebody coming in from the outside. So the longer you stay with the company, really, the more likely it is that you will fall behind the market because of this situation. So this is a big mindset shift that's been happening over the last 20 years or so. Tenures at companies are shrinking.

The average executive tenure might only be three years now. So you have to be thinking about mobility, keeping your value current and updated all the time. And I occasionally think about, you know, while I'm comfortable here, is it really the best thing for my career? Maybe I could hop over to another company.

If I leave on good terms, I could always come back. And very often people who do that, that are willing to do that, can leapfrog their own, you know, they can take these giant 20% leaps, you know, back and forth instead of waiting on a three or four percent annual merit increase. That is a great point, for real, because I've seen both cases in my practice and around me. And that still needs to make sense because life is not endless, and some companies are going to exist much longer than one human's life, and they've been there on the market, some of them before we were born.

So we have to keep in mind that that's the name of the game. We still need to move forward so that it makes sense out of our life as well. And in this sense, how can soft skills, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness become a true competitive advantage when negotiating in an AI-shaped environment? Oh, I love this question.

You're asking such great questions, Emmy. So I want to tell you a story about technical salespeople. So you have a bunch of engineers working at a company, they're all developing products. And then there is a technical salesperson who is selling the technical product to a technical buyer, and that technical buyer has technical questions.

And the technical salesperson that sits between these two engineering groups acts like a translator almost between these two groups. And who do you think makes the more money? The top technical salesperson or the top engineer that's developing and innovating the next generation of product. In my experience, the technical salespeople are rare people who can understand the technology, translate it and communicate it.

And so that communication ability and the ability to translate, I think, is a massive influence on your income. The people that rise into leadership in technical environments are all going to be strong communicators and people that understand human emotions and are good at the change management stuff that I mentioned before. They're not purely technical people. The worst leaders in technical organizations happen when they take the best engineer and they promote them to manager.

That person doesn't have all these soft skills, right? So soft skills are going to remain a very coveted thing. And here's the warning coming from me. And I don't know if you'll agree with this.

I think you might. As learning language models become more ubiquitous and people rely on AI to form their sentences and shape their ideas. I'm a little concerned that those parts of the mind that are doing that for us now might atrophy like an unused muscle. And a few years from now, I'm worried that people won't be able to form coherent sentences or communicate their ideas effectively or create a thesis argument.

Logic and step-by-step reasoning might start to suffer because we form this dependency on something else to do it for us. I read a study like long ago. I have to dig this up. But they did a study on cab drivers in New York City, and they compared the brain scans of a cab driver that used the navigation system in the complex city to a cab driver that didn't and was navigating based on maps and their memory of streets and things like that.

And the brain activity was not only stronger in the person who wasn't so dependent upon technology, but certain portions of the brain were actually larger than that person. So, like the threat of atrophy, I think is big. We need to think about AI, but continuously develop our soft skills. Persuasion is another thing that we need to remain good at.

When you're negotiating pay or things like that, your ability to understand the feelings of another person and feel that emotional current, know when you can go a little harder, know when you need to back off, how to think from their point of view so that you can give them what they want instead of just focusing on what you want. These are critical soft skills that you'll need to stay on top in the new world, not just from a negotiating standpoint, but from a leadership standpoint.

I absolutely love this. And we need to look not only into today and tomorrow, but into the future of humanity. And without those soft skills and emotional intelligence, we are not going to preserve the best parts of who we are and can become. So it is truly important to develop them, and it's going to help businesses grow and expand as well.

John, what is the winning strategy for leveling up professional worth and raising one's salary at a time when it's becoming harder just to keep a position? And what should HR professionals keep in mind on their end as they navigate the future of human capital? Great questions. So I think, like right now, when you say it's it's getting harder just to keep a position, that's true.

Um, there's been a lot of disruption in the job market lately that creates this feeling that there's a soft employment market right now. And when I'm interacting with people that I'm coaching and working with, this feeling that there's soft demand for me pushes you emotionally into this place where you want to lowball yourself. You are more fearful than average that you won't get the offer, or that if you push on the offer, it's going to be taken away from you. So I think that when we talk about winning strategies, you have to realize that it is possible to get a strong offer even in a soft employment market.

Remember that once you are selected, basically, once they offer you a position, that means that they want you to say yes. And when they when somebody wants something, you can almost always ask for something in return. They do not remember, even in a soft employment market, they don't want to go back to the beginning screening and interviewing more people. This vacancy that they're trying to fill is expensive.

They might not have a backup candidate. They really just want you to say yes so that they can move on and bring you in and start solving the problems. Stop the whining and the team that's saying, I have to do three jobs because this job is vacant. So remember one winning strategy is simply to remember that you have leverage even in a soft employment market.

Don't let that degrade your confidence to the point where you feel like you have to settle for less because odds are you do not. Be careful not to sacrifice your employment brand because you can get away with lower offers, laying people off more, things like that in a soft market. Because at some point things will flip. You'll have a massive growth opportunity in your business.

You need to hire people as fast as possible. And guess what? You can't, because now your reputation is damaged. You're competing against other companies that have a solid reputation.

And if you don't continuously invest in creating a positive employment reputation for your company, man, is it going to be hard to grow into a profitable shift? So be very cautious about this. Advise your leaders to be cautious about this. Even when the stock market and the board of directors is pressuring them to cut costs.

Just be mindful, remind them that there are long-term costs associated with making short-term soft employment market-related decisions. Spot on, 100%. Great advice. What do ambitious professionals need to unlearn to successfully upgrade their pay, benefits, and professional value now and in the coming years?

Let's look into the coming trends and into this part with unlearning because usually it's always about performance, about running faster, reaching more. But at the same time, we need to create some space for more. Yeah, I think I mentioned this earlier, but I think you should unlearn the idea that loyalty is rewarded automatically. Data actually shows that mobility often drives faster growth in your career and in your pay.

So that's something to think about. You need to also, when it comes to negotiation, unlearn the idea that negotiation is a high-stakes game of chicken, that it is about conflict and risk. It does not have to be about either one of those things. The best negotiators in the world are looking for win-win outcomes.

And so most people don't negotiate because they're afraid. And because of that, most people just nope out of negotiating altogether because it's like that's not me, or especially in the soft market. I don't want to take the risk of that high stakes, high risk thing. So good negotiation is collaborative, not high conflict.

It's low risk and not high risk. And there are ways you can do this. You just have to learn how. And another thing to unlearn is to think, I don't know how.

This is a learnable skill, just like anything else. Anyone can learn how to manage their career and upgrade their pay. So all of these things I'm mentioning are agnostic toward AI. It's mindset.

This is exactly the evergreen part, and that's why we always need to keep in mind that technologies are developing, some of them are exploding and moving forward, some of them are putonized, but us humans, as somebody who is developing those technologies and who is using those technologies, so they are by humans and for humans, except all the artificial content which is now by AI and to a certain extent for AI, I saw actually a shocking number that about 52% of content online is AI generated.

And that already means that we are running completely different types of risks. But speaking about those unlearning parts, they are brilliant, and I like that you are focused on the mindset and on those value parts which are truly non-negotiables. So it is really important to think about whole the situation in the way you just presented. John, what is one piece of advice you would give to leaders and professionals who want to stay ahead and thrive?

SEI begins to play a growing role in pay decision and talent evaluation. How can they make sure they are not just competing with algorithms, but leveraging them to elevate their true worth? Great question. So this is a common piece of advice and a common, at least that I give.

I think maybe it's uncommon in the market, but even though AI may have some influence on the initial offer that comes out to you, that doesn't mean that you have to take or even, you know, accept that that's accurate. So my advice here one piece of advice to people who want to thrive in salary negotiations, even as AI gets more involved, don't take the offer immediately. 80% of people do take that offer immediately because they just want to do away with the uncertainty in their lives.

And I do understand that. They may come at you like that, giving you this idea that it's a careful calculation and therefore not negotiable. But I want to tell you that once a company decides they want to hire you, lots of things remain negotiable. And the most powerful time you'll have in the whole process of looking for work, the most powerful time is between when they offer you the job and when you say yes.

So during that time, they want you to say yes. Remember, they want you to say yes, and you can ask for some modifications to the offer to get you to say yes. There's specific scripts that I teach people how to do in order to safely navigate this, but you need to test whether there's any. Flexibility in different parts of the offer where it's flexible, where it's not flexible, to get the things that are really top value for you.

This is where AI tends to step out of the decision and the human decision makers come in. Right? So AI might tell them what offer you should initially get. Here's the offer that John Gates is most likely to accept that aligns with his experience and the value we think he's going to create here at ABC Company.

Well, now there's modifications to that. And it's usually going to be human modifications. And there's a human at the top of this decision tree on the company side. A hiring manager with goals of his or her own.

They see you, they want to hire you because you're going to help them to further those important goals. Maybe their job's even at risk if they don't bring you on, if they miss a deadline. Who knows what? But you have leverage here, and it's a human typically that's going to make an exception or agree to offer you a little bit more here, there, or someplace else.

And sometimes you don't even know to you try. There's a lot of money still on the table. Might be $50,000 or $60,000, might be 10 times that. I've seen it all, and it's crazy.

So that biggest piece of advice how to survive and thrive. Don't take that first offer. Buy yourself some time. It doesn't mean you're going to negotiate, but you will test.

Test that offer to see what can move. And you might be surprised. It might not be firm, but you never know until you try. And this is a perfect wrap up to our today's conversation.

You never know until you try. And today you shared with us so many brilliant recommendations. And you also took us behind the scenes to show how this game is functioning from the inside. So it is truly valuable for everybody who is searching for another job or opportunity for upgrade, professional upgrade on the market.

And even though it is, as you mentioned, time for soft market now, and potentially the risks for the job seekers are higher. But still, it is important to keep in mind that everything is in your hands, and there is that sweet spot. From the moment you've got an offer, don't give up and optimize it until you're happy with it, because it is about creating a win-win situation. Thank you so much, John.

It's been such a great pleasure having this conversation with you today. Thank you for sharing your wisdom, your advice, and your experience with us today. Truly appreciated. Thanks, Abby.

As always, it's so much fun to talk with you, and I always learn something new each time. So thank you. Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to the next opportunity to continue this conversation.

Thank you for joining us on Digital Transformation and AI for humans. I'm Amy, and it was enriching to share this time with you. Remember, the core of any transformation lies in our human nature, how we think, feel, and connect with others. It is about enhancing our emotional intelligence, embracing a winning mindset, and leading with empathy and insight.

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