Career Negotiations Podcast

PayPal Salary Negotiation – How to Negotiate PayPal Salary

• Brandon Bramley

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Are you about to negotiate a PayPal offer? In this episode, I break down compensation at PayPal, then walk you through my proven step-by-step PayPal salary negotiation strategies and highlight some common mistakes to avoid during a PayPal offer negotiation. 

That way you have salary negotiation tips that actually work.

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WHO AM I

I'm Brandon, the Founder and Lead Negotiator at The Salary Negotiator®. As a former corporate negotiator, I now help employees increase their compensation. Through hundreds of salary negotiations, I've helped career professionals secure over $200 million in additional compensation. My expertise is backed by more than 150 five-star reviews from career professionals on Google and Trustpilot.

Brandon:

PayPal provides competitive compensation and perks to most of their employees, but how do you know if your job offer is actually competitive before you accept it? In this episode, my goal is to cover everything you need to confidently navigate a PayPal salary negotiation. I'm first going to cover the compensation structure of PayPal so you know more about PayPal's base salary, bonus, equity package, and sign-up bonus in the job offers. That way you're going to know exactly what to expect before you even get it. Then I'm going to walk you through my five recommended steps of negotiating a PayPal job offer that are proven through real PayPal salary negotiations that I've actually led from my clients. That way you're going to be able to filter out some of the bad advice out there and use my salary negotiation strategies that actually work with PayPal. And I'm going to close out the episode by highlighting three common mistakes that you're going to need to avoid when you go through a PayPal salary negotiation. That way you don't risk the opportunity and you actually secure competitive compensation. So let's get into it. Hey everyone, welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, my name is Brandon Bramley and I'm the founder and the lead negotiator at https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/. I provide professional job offer negotiation coaching, salary negotiation courses, and tools to help professionals like you navigate the negotiation process and secure competitive compensation. I'm not just a career coach or recruiter giving out generic salary negotiation advice. There's already enough bad advice floating around online. So instead, I personally led hundreds of salary negotiations across various roles, helping my clients secure hundreds of millions more in compensation. My background is actually in strategic negotiations, and my goal is to debunk some of the banned advice out there and give you proven salary negotiation strategies that are actually going to help you earn more. So if you're a career professional and you're looking to earn competitive pay, subscribe here for actual tips. And when you're ready to take your negotiations to the next level, visit thesalarynegotiator.com for coaching courses tools that are designed to help you negotiate the best possible offer. Now, before we dive into how to negotiate a PayPal job offer, let's talk about the compensation components. It's really important to understand the difference between your base salary and your total compensation. Too many people focus on only the base salary for role, but that's really just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to pay at PayPal. So when you're considering a move to PayPal, you're going to need to look at the whole picture, okay? Which is your total monetary take-home pay, also known as your total compensation. This includes your base salary, your annual bonus, and the value of your vesting equity each year, and any sign-on bonuses because you are going to find those four compensation components in a PayPal job offer, and I'm going to talk through them all now. First, there's your PayPal base salary. This is your consistent guaranteed pay that you'll see in every paycheck. It's really only going to change if you get promoted or you see a merit increase because it's a set rate. It's a pretty standard comp component that hopefully you've all seen in any of your roles throughout your career, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that. Second, you're going to have an annual performance bonus at PayPal, which is going to be a percentage of your base salary. It's typically going to range 10 to 30% depending on your PayPal role and level. It's based on performance each year and it's paid out annually, so it can fluctuate. While the PayPal bonus is tied to your base salary, note that it's not negotiable. Okay, so negotiations aren't going to work to increase it, but if you do negotiate a higher base salary, your PayPal bonus is going to increase along with it, so keep that in mind. Third, you're going to receive equity at PayPal. Your initial PayPal equity package comes in the form of RSUs, which are called restricted stock units. These represent an actual ownership in PayPal. These RSUs are subject to a three-year PayPal ving schedule though, which is going to mean that your PayPal equity is going to best over a three-year period in equal increments, meaning you're going to get a third of your RSUs in year one, the second third at the end of year two, and the final third at the end of year three. So you're not going to get the full value of your PayPal equity up front, but you do get to share in the value fluctuations over that period. So if the PayPal stock price goes up, so does the value of your equity and your total compensation. The unfortunate flip side though is if PayPal's not doing great, stock price goes down, so does your equity value and so does your total compensation. So there is resp when you get equity in your roles. And it's also important to note that if you do leave PayPal before your RSU is fully vest, you're unfortunately going to walk away from those unvested portions and not get to reap that value. So keep that in mind when you do think you're going to change roles. Finally, there's the PayPal sign-up bonus. This is a one-time cash payment typically paid out to new hires 30 days after you start or with your first paycheck. It's often designed to offset loss incentives or equity from your previous company or just as an incentive. But PayPal sign-up bonuses aren't always included just for that. So usually you're able to negotiate them because they're not always going to be in your initial offer. But luckily, we've had great success securing them for my clients. So you can push for them and you should be able to get one. And the last compensation component that I do want to call out is PayPal does offer annual equity refreshers, which are going to be additional RSU grants each year. However, these PayPal stock refreshers usually are going to fluctuate and they're not always guaranteed. So I don't include them in my total compensation calculations, but it is worth asking the PayPal recruiter about these stock refreshes to get a general idea of what they're going to look like in your role over the course of the years. Now, these four PayPal salary components, your base salary, your bonus, your equity, and your sign-up bonus are going to make up your total compensation at PayPal. To help you visualize this, we have a total compensation calculator (https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/total-compensation-calculator) on our site. It lets you input your base salary, your bonus percentage, your equity grant, and your sign-up bonus, then shows you estimated compensation over four years, both in total and on an annual basis. You can find our free compensation calculator at thesalarynegotiator.com, and I'll also link to it in the episode notes so you can use this free tool. Alright, now that we've covered how PayPal's compensation structure actually works and how it's going to look, let's discuss the PayPal salary negotiation steps. That's why we're all here. So these are the strategies that I've actually used to successfully negotiate many PayPal job offers, and I'm going to recommend you all follow them to navigate the PayPal salary negotiation once you actually have an offer in hand. Now, once you have a PayPal job offer, the first step to negotiating is to make sure you fully understand the compensation components and the benefits in your PayPal offer package. The biggest takeaway from this is understanding the PayPal total compensation before negotiating. That way you're going to know exactly how to value the PayPal offer and exactly what to negotiate, including the core components, which are your base salary, your annual bonus, your equity, and your sign-on bonus. The second step is what I call doing your due diligence and asking strategic questions. This is where you review the PayPal offer and come back with a list of questions to the recruiter. This is not only going to help you clarify any questions you might have about the offer, but it allows you to strategically ask questions that are going to build negotiation leverage. You can call out things that might not be as competitive at your current company or what some of the competitors offer that you're seeing, right? And if you need some ideas, you can always grab my list of strategic questions from my templates page or find them in my course where I walk through them there. Because I really don't want you to skip this step. Even if you think you already know the offer, this step is important for building negotiation leverage by showing you're doing your research and showing you're doing your due diligence and offer before sending a counteroffer out of left field. It's also going to let you secure any freebies or items that the recruiter might use as trade-offs later on, so just don't skip it. The third step is to do your PayPal compensation research. Very important because you need to find the base salary range and the total compensation ranges for your specific role, the location, and the level at PayPal. You can use various online resources to find this data, but you need to make sure you're averaging across multiple sources. That way you're getting realistic results. Because what we're trying to do here is we're trying to find the compensation ranges so we can see where your initial offer sits on that role and how much actual room there is for improvement. There might be more room if your pay is on the bottom end of the pay band. There might be less room if you're already coming in at the top end. So it's very important because PayPal does try to hire employees at the lower to mid end of the pay bands. So I'm always going to suggest that you push for the absolute top end of the pay band range so you are paid competitively when you come in. But remember, the data that you're going to be pulling is going to be publicly reported data, so it's not always going to be accurate. People might report higher equity than a new hire get due to stock appreciation of PayPal, or they might not upload the compensation correctly. So if you do want help with this and you want to be doing it correctly, feel free to grab our compensation research comparison tool, our templates page, or go through our salary negotiation course where I actually talk in a lot more detail of exactly how to do the compensation research for your exact role and prepare for the counteroffer. Once you have the PayPal compensation research done and you've gotten your answers to the questions, you're now ready to draft your PayPal counteroffer. This is where we're going to take a database approach and craft a PayPal counteroffer to send to the recruiting team. We're going to present it, the top end of the range that we're targeting based off your research and call out any items that might not have been competitive when you got the due diligence questions back. I'm going to highly urge you to send this by email instead of doing it over the phone because that's going to give the recruiter exactly everything they need to take back to the comp teams instead of hoping that they're going to sit on a call and write everything down. Plus, if you think about it, recruiters at PayPal negotiate offers every day. So they're going to know exactly where you're coming from and they're going to steer you in different directions on that call and use tactics to get you to fold and accept the offer as is. So speaking of getting you to accept the offer as is, the final step is always being prepared after setting a PayPal count offer for pushback and overcoming objections. Because it's almost guaranteed that you're going to get some pushback from their recruiting team and they're going to try to deter you from negotiating or get you to accept the initial offer. So if you're prepared for that and you actually know how to overcome those objections, you can actually get them to take your concerns back to the comp team. And by doing that, you're essentially going to want to let the recruiter know that you understand their constraints, but nicely reiterate yours and ask them to take it back for one last look. It might take overcoming these objections a few times, but once they agree to take it back, hopefully nine times out of ten, they're going to come back with a better offer. It's obviously easier said than done to handle recruiter pushback. So that's why I have all of our objection handlers that you can download from my templates page, or you can find out exactly how I walk through this and how I professionally overcome these in our course. If you need the scripts (https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/resource-center/salary-negotiation-script-strategies-for-job-offer-negotiations) on exactly what to say when you do encounter pushback in the negotiation. And finally, from here, you're either going to have the PayPal recruiter come back with a better offer that fits your needs and you're ready to accept, or it's going to be lower for your in your ass. So at that point, you can either accept the offer if you're ready, or you can see if it's worth sending a second PayPal counter offer to push one last time before you accept that offer. Just note that negotiating salary is not going to be how you negotiate in other business-to-business deals or at a carlet dealership, right? It's not aggressive. There's not a lot of back and forth. And really you don't want to send more than two PayPal counter offers, otherwise you risk coming off as aggressive and jeopardizing the relationship. Now the last thing I want to cover is a few PayPal salary negotiation mistakes before you decide to negotiate a PayPal job offer. The main item I recommend against is sharing your salary expectations or current pay with the PayPal recruiting team. This is unfortunately only going to work against you because if you think about it, right, if you throw out a number that's lower than what they could offer up front or even before you start the interviews, you're probably going to end up at the low end of their pay range or it could actually lead to being downleveled, which is very common at tech companies. So you don't want to do that, right? On the flip side, if you think it's a great idea to throw out a high number thinking that's going to give you a very competitive offer, it's another bad strategy because we don't want them saying, shoot, I'm not sure if we can afford this person. They're asking for way too much. So let's go with a different candidate instead. So you might not even get the offer or come off as too aggressive. So definitely not a good strategy. And remember, the PayPal recruiter knows exactly what they can pay for the role. You always want to turn that question back on them to learn exactly what the base salary range is and the total compensation range for the role. And then once you have the offer, go through the strategic negotiation steps to actually negotiate the package. My second tip or mistake to avoid is making sure that you are realistic about what you should ask for in the PayPal count offer. Way too often have I seen people ask for way too much that just doesn't make sense for the role. You're either going to get laughed at or if it's going to come off as too aggressive. And in some cases, if it is too aggressive, you might even get the offer rescinded because they think they can't afford you. So you're always going to want to make sure that you're doing your compensation research for PayPal (https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/paypal-software-engineer-salary) and taking a data-based approach. That way you're actually asking for realistic compensation that they might be able to provide. Because at the end of the day, PayPal has set comp bands and they're only going to pay within those bands for a specific role and level. So don't jeopardize the PayPal job offer by coming out as too aggressive and asking for unrealistic numbers. Never a good strategy. And finally, don't be worried about negotiating a salary with PayPal, right? You're going to feel nervous, but as long as you're following our strategies or strategies that are proven and working with a hopefully a negotiation professional, there's no reason you'd risk the PayPal offer, right? Because if you do it right and you do follow the PayPal salary negotiation steps correctly, the best case scenario is you're going to end up with a better offer and a package that you're going to feel comfortable about and not think later down the road that you messed something up or you didn't get a competitive comp before you started. This wraps up this episode on PayPal salary negotiation (https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/resource-center/paypal-salary-negotiation). I hope this breakdown of PayPal's compensation structure, our proven PayPal salary negotiation strategies, and the negotiation mistakes to avoid help you feel more confident in these discussions. But if you're serious about getting the best possible offer with PayPal or any company for that matter, I highly recommend you never go into the salary negotiation alone. So head over to thesalarynegotiator.com to either work with me directly as your salary negotiation coach or check out my salary negotiation course (https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/courses) and tools (https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/salary-negotiation-templates). You'll find all the links in the episode notes below. That way you have exactly what you need to be successful in these conversations. And if you did find this episode helpful, please make sure you subscribe, leave a comment, and share it with someone who might use this advice in their career. Thanks for tuning in and good luck with your negotiations.

Brandon:

SALARY NEGOTIATION TOOLS MENTIONED • Salary Negotiation Coaching: https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/ • Salary Negotiation Courses: https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/courses • Salary Negotiation Templates: https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/salary-negotiation-templates • Counteroffer Example: https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/store/counteroffer-examples • Salary Negotiation Script Guide: https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/resource-center/salary-negotiation-script-strategies-for-job-offer-negotiations • How to Negotiate a Job Offer Guide: https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/job-offer-negotiation-course • How to Negotiate a Raise Guide: https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/salary-negotiation-course • Total Compensation Calculator: https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/total-compensation-calculator PAYPAL SALARY NEGOTIATION RESOURCES • PayPal Salary Negotiation Guide: https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/resource-center/paypal-salary-negotiation • PayPal Software Engineer Salary: https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/paypal-software-engineer-salary • Product Manager Salary: https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/product-manager-salary • Software Engineer Salary Negotiation: https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/resource-center/how-to-negotiate-a-software-engineer-job-offer • Product Manager Salary Negotiation: https://www.thesalarynegotiator.com/resource-center/how-to-negotiate-a-product-manager-job-offer • Video Guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4-Je3SkT-I  

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