The Raise Conversation: Evidence, Not Bargaining

From the field: a counteroffer made in panic

That evening I called HR. “If we lose them, nobody else knows the payment integration,” I said. That was true. But that was the whole conversation: risk, urgency, a number. I did not ask them a single question. I did not ask why they had listened to another offer.

The counteroffer was accepted. Everyone relaxed, including me. Three months later two things happened. Two engineers at the same level found out about the gap over lunch. The gap was 22%. Neither of them had ever asked for a raise. One of them said a single sentence to me in a one-on-one: “So here you get a raise by threatening to leave.” I had no answer.

Seven months later the person I had kept with the counteroffer resigned. This time they did not ask for a counteroffer. In the exit conversation they said: “It was not really the money. For eight months I had been maintaining the same integration. I told you twice that I wanted to build something new. When the offer came, I felt there was no point in saying it again.”

So I had closed a question with money. The question was never about money. And while closing it, I had taught the rest of the team the wrong lesson. I did not lose one person. I lost two people and a rule.

What is a raise request really asking?

There can be three different questions behind “I want a raise”. If you answer before you know which one it is, you answer the wrong question.

• “I have fallen behind the market.” You can discuss this with evidence. Their level has a pay band, and they have a position in it. If they are below it, that is your mistake.
• “My work grew, my pay did not.” This is also discussed with evidence. A year ago they looked after one service. Now they look after a system three teams use. That is a level question, not only a pay question.
• “I am unhappy about something else, and money is the only thing we can talk about.” The most dangerous one. If you give money, the problem looks solved. The real problem stays where it was.

The only way to spot the third one is to ask. My first question now is: “Money aside, what keeps you here, and what pushes you away?” If the answer is “nothing pushes me, I have just fallen behind”, the conversation goes back to the first or second case. If the answer is a long silence, the raise conversation is over and a different one begins. The fact that I had never heard that silence in our one-on-ones is a signal of its own.

What do you say when there is no budget?

The budget may be closed. It may be the middle of the year, or the company may have frozen pay. That is not a reason to end the conversation with “I cannot do anything right now”. Even when you cannot give money, you can give two things: clarity and a date.

I said “definitely in March” once. March came and the budget was still closed. I did not pay for that sentence with a raise. I paid with trust: in the next three one-on-ones, every date I gave was questioned. A promise of an amount and a date is not a promise if you do not control it. The only thing you control is when, and with what evidence, you take the topic to your own manager. I wrote about how I build that conversation in the managing up post.

The evidence file

If a raise request goes up the chain, it goes with a file, not with the person’s voice. I prepare the file, together with the person. One page:

RAISE REQUEST                         date: 2025-11-14
----------------------------------------------------------
Level           : Senior engineer
Band (level)    : low ----- mid ----- high
Position        :   ^  (18% into the band)

LAST 12 MONTHS - SCOPE
  before: one service (payment notifications)
  now   : integration layer used by 3 teams

LAST 12 MONTHS - IMPACT
  - owner of onboarding for 2 people
  - wrote the root cause analysis for 4 incidents

MARKET
  - 2 independent sources, same level, same city

SAME LEVEL
  - 6 people, this person is 5th   # no names, only rank

REQUEST    : move to the 50% point of the band
FALLBACK (no budget): January review, in writing

Two things are missing from this file on purpose. The first is the competing offer. “They got an offer elsewhere” is not evidence, it is pressure. The evidence is the position in the band and the growing scope. The second is this period’s performance. Performance answers “how did this period go”. Pay answers “how big is the work they do”. I described what happened when I mixed the two in the performance post.

What do you do when a counteroffer moment comes?

These are the steps I should have taken that Thursday evening. I take them in order now:

1. Say thank you and ask for 24 hours. “Thank you for telling me. Let us talk at this time tomorrow.” No calling HR that same evening.
2. The first question is not about money. “Why did you listen to the offer?” Nobody goes to an interview for no reason. On the day they went, there was a reason.
3. Check the evidence. If they are below the band, that is your mistake. Fix it. But fix it as a correction, not as a counteroffer, and look at everyone else at the same level too.
4. If the reason is not money, do not offer money. If the reason is the work, the direction or a person, talk about that. If you cannot fix it now, say so honestly. Sometimes the right answer is “you should take this offer”.

I put the counteroffers of the last three years into a table. It is a small sample, but the direction is clear:

Both people I kept with money left within a year. The only one who stayed was the person whose reason really was money, and who got a band correction instead of a counteroffer. Four cases are not enough for a rule. But I no longer treat a counteroffer as the default answer.

Same level, different pay

This is the hidden cost of counteroffers. After that incident I put everyone at the senior level side by side. Six people. The gap between the highest and the lowest was 41%. I tried to explain the gap. Performance did not explain it. Two things did: the date they joined, and who had negotiated before.

So the behaviour the system rewarded was not good work. It was good bargaining. The quiet person who did good work was the one the system punished. Nobody designed this. Every single decision made sense on its own. The total was unfair.

Since that year I have two rules:

• A band review once a year. At every level, everyone is placed in the band. Nobody stays outside the band for more than one period.
• If one person gets a correction, everyone at the same level is checked. Fixing one person and forgetting the others just moves the unfairness somewhere else.

In the first review, three of the six people were below the band. There was no budget to fix all three in one period. We spread the correction over two periods and told all three in writing, with dates. The engineer who had learned about the gap over lunch was one of those three. “You are late,” they said. They were right. But this time they knew what would change and when, and at the end of the second period it changed on the date we had given.

Band transparency: how much?

I do not publish a list of individual salaries. Some teams argue for that; I have not tried it on ours. But these three things are open to everyone:

• The lower and upper limit of every level.
• The person’s own position in the band (bottom quarter, middle, top quarter).
• What moves you up inside the band: scope, impact, growth within the level.

Once these three were open, the language of raise conversations changed. Instead of “I want more”, I started to hear “I am in the bottom quarter of the band, and my scope is mid-band work”. I can answer the second one with evidence. I can only answer the first one by bargaining.

Who opens the conversation?

For a long time I thought the raise conversation was something the other person started. They ask, I answer. In all four cases in the table, they opened the conversation, and every time it came with an offer. So I was hearing about the problem at the worst possible moment to fix it: with a deadline on Monday.

Now I open it myself, twice a year, inside the one-on-one. It is a short conversation, 15 minutes, with three sentences:

1. “This is where you are in the band, and this is why.” I say it before they ask. Even when it is bad news.
2. “This is the work that moves you up in the band.” Concrete work. “Take more responsibility” is not work.
3. “The next review is on this date.” I give a date. I do not give an amount.

Most of these conversations are boring. That is how it should be. A boring raise conversation is one where nobody is surprised. Exciting raise conversations happen where something has not been discussed for months.

There was also a side effect. Because people know where they sit in the band, they can judge an outside offer themselves. In the last year two people got offers and told me in a one-on-one before they decided. Both said “I do not want a counteroffer, I just wanted you to know”. Both stayed. And I learned, without a counteroffer, that what keeps a person is not the number. It is knowing why the number is what it is.

What to track

What did not work for me

• A counteroffer within 18 hours. Speed looked like good intentions. It was really a way to skip the conversation. Giving a number was easier than asking a question.
• Keeping the counteroffer secret. I said “let us keep this between us”. Within three months it came out over lunch. People talk about pay; secrecy only delays the unfairness.
• One raise period, a closed door. I set a rule: “raise conversations only in January”. People stopped talking in the middle of the year and started taking offers. The budget cycle can be once a year. The conversation cannot.
• Going up with only a market report. I took a market report to my manager. The answer was “everyone is below the market”. One page that showed the growing scope did what the report could not.

Checklist

Conclusion

That Thursday evening I thought I was buying a conversation with a number. What I bought was seven months. In exchange, I taught two people on the team that “a raise comes when you threaten to leave”. Taking that lesson back cost more than the counteroffer itself.

Today I go into a raise conversation with a table and a question. The table shows the band. The question looks for what is behind the money. Most of the time, the two are enough. When they are not, at least I know why.

The test: does the quietest person on your team earn the same as the best negotiator on your team? If not, you do have a pay policy. But bargaining writes it, not you.