Hi Reader,

This week on the Gentle Power Podcast, we spoke with Soumya Maya, who's building an AI product to help people making career pivots. She started out in architecture, spent a decade moving across different industries, and most recently worked in product management at edtech startups before leaving a few months ago to support career changers.

Most people who switch industries assume they’re starting over, that a new field means a weaker hand when it comes to compensation, level, and title. Soumya thinks about it differently - the negotiation doesn't start when you get an offer or even when you start interviewing for jobs; it starts the day you decide to pivot your career.

Here are some takeaways from our conversation, plus links to the full episode: YouTube | Spotify | Apple​

Your negotiation starts on day zero, not when you get the offer

Soumya's hot take is about timing. Most people assume the negotiation starts when you get the offer or when numbers are first brought up during the interviews. Soumya asserts it starts much, much earlier:

“Negotiation doesn't actually start when you're… halfway through the job interviews, but really day zero when you're figuring out your entire career mind map, who you are, where you can add value.”

By the time you're discussing salary, your leverage has either been bolstered or weakened by the narrative you’ve brought with you into the interviews. Before you even start applying to jobs, think through the career story you want to tell about yourself, why you’re applying to the company and the role, and why now. For career changers, this is especially important.

Note: this is a sponsored newsletter. If you check them out below, it means a lot to us and helps keep our newsletter going!

Career changers assume they have less power, and it costs them

When you move into a new industry, the assumption is that you're starting from zero, so you must hold less power. Soumya sees this sentiment in nearly every one of her clients. She's watched people at every stage, from new grads to those with 15+ years of proven impact, doubt their own work the moment they enter a new space.

A lot of it, she and Gerta agreed, is cultural conditioning. How you were raised to think about identity, self-pride, and self-esteem shapes how you show up before you say a word.

When you believe you have no leverage, you act like it. You concede on salary before anyone pushes back, and the imposter feeling starts running the conversation for you.

Do the inner work first: write down what you're proud of

Before any of the outward positioning, Soumya spends her first several conversations with clients, sometimes over months, helping them feel good about what they've already done. She's blunt that this is hard. When she asks someone to list ten things they're proud of from their career, many can’t even list five.

Having dealt with imposter syndrome and anxiety herself, Soumya knows the exercise matters because those ten things are where your transferable skills live.

She also makes room for grace. “I might mess up some of these conversations and negotiations, but it's okay. I'm learning,” is how she frames it for clients who are hard on themselves. The stakes feel enormous during a job search, which is exactly when people turn most critical of themselves.

Years of experience, but treated like a beginner

You can have years of experience and still get treated as “fresh” in a new field. Alex has seen this when he saw co-workers pivot to new functions when worked at Instagram / Meta. You could spend five years in product operations or product marketing, and to move into product management at many companies, you'd still start as an associate PM.

So where's the leverage? Soumya's answer is to find the points that actually transfer. Maybe it's deep domain expertise, where you know healthcare, fintech, or the relevant field cold, the customers, the workflows, how the industry moves. And if title and pay won't budge because you're new to the space, there's room to negotiate elsewhere, like professional development budget, wfh flexibility, or any benefits that are meaningful at your stage of life.

She added one more piece of prep that's easy to skip: knowing what to say no to. Figuring out where you add value also means naming the places you don't, and that focus makes your whole profile much sharper.

Your narrative does double duty: it helps you advocate for yourself and it helps people advocate for you

The narrative you build does two jobs at once. It gives you confidence walking into all your interviews, and it hands the hiring team the exact story they need to argue for you when you're not in the room.

Recruiters and hiring managers are swamped. Soumya pointed out that popular early and mid-career roles can pull hundreds, if not thousands, of applications within hours. If your story clearly connects the dots for them, you make yourself easy to champion, and you show the value you'd bring from day one instead of “someday”.

She added a superpower that sits on top of expertise: genuinely loving the space. “I am obsessed or insanely passionate about this particular industry or problem” and explaining why makes you more memorable, and it tends to mean you'll enjoy the work more once you're in it.

Gerta noted this maps almost exactly onto two worksheets we give clients: one on the ten things you're proud of, and one on why you want this specific role, specific enough that you couldn't paste it into an application for any other company.

The first no isn't a no

Early on, Soumya treated negotiation as one exchange: you make the ask, you get an answer, and that's the whole process. She's since let that framing go.

She put it simply: “the first no is not always a no.” You can keep the conversation open and look at the situation from the other side's point of view. When you factor in what works for them alongside what you want, you can find additional pathways to align.

Gerta added the principle that’s operating underneath this all, which is information gathering. A big part of negotiating is figuring out the other side's priorities by asking the right questions to get there.

Ask more than once

A lot of people ask just once, then stop. Our hunch is they've been burned before, where asking again got a bad reaction, so they filed away a personal rule to not push too hard.

Soumya and Alex reframed the whole thing around what Alex calls infinite games. Your negotiation isn't happening in a vacuum. The person across from you may show up again later in your career, since the working world gets smaller the further you go and people change companies all the time.

That longer view changes how you interpret a bad reaction. If you ask gently and professionally and a company rescinds the offer, that's an overreaction on their part, and it probably saved you from joining a team that couldn't handle one honest conversation. Soumya's take was that you didn't make a mistake, it just wouldn't have worked out if they couldn't talk it through with you.

Soumya's thesis is that the work starts well before the offer, and most of it is work you do on yourself. Give the episode a listen if you're eyeing a career switch or just want to walk into your next negotiation better prepared.

The full episode here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple​

Connect with Soumya and see what she's building: LinkedIn​

​
Warmly,

Gerta & Alex

Founders, YourNegotiations.com

P.S. Are you job searching or have upcoming negotiations?

If you have an offer coming or are mid-process, we’re always happy to help you think through how to approach it. Book a free call here: https://calendly.com/alexhapki/call​

P.P.S. Know someone interested in negotiations?

Send them our way and we’ll thank you with $250 for each person who becomes a client. No cap.

A quick intro or an email to alex@yournegotiations.com works.