Salary and Job Offer Negotiation Assessment with Spoken CountersYou can write the counter. Can you say it out loud?
Thirty-seven keyed decisions and three spoken counters, scored in what your moves cost rather than in how many you got right.
Negotiation help in this market is a course. This is a measurement.
There is no shortage of advice about negotiating pay, and a two-and-a-half hour video course on the subject sells for around two hundred dollars. What none of it does is tell you which decisions you personally get wrong, and the ones you get wrong are the whole of it: a lower start compounds through every rise built on top of it, so a small concession in one afternoon is paid for over years.
This sitting puts you inside an ordinary offer. The recruiter asks your number ten minutes into a screening call. Somebody tells you what the last person in the role earned. The letter arrives with a start date and a figure. The band is fixed. The shares cannot be sold for four years. The deadline is tomorrow morning. Fourteen of the exercises are forced choices where you name what you would say and what you would never say, so nothing can be protected without something else being given up.
Your headline is not a percentage of right answers. Every option carries a cost, and the four kinds of error are priced differently, because giving money away early costs more and for longer than asking for too much. That price list is printed on your report so you can disagree with a specific row rather than with a score. And both poles of every forced choice carry their own published priors, because the move almost nobody would make first is not the move most people would refuse.
Then there are the three spoken exercises, and they are the point of the product. Almost anybody can write a counter. The test is whether the figure survives being said out loud, without the apology, the hedge and the immediate discount that follow it in most people's mouths. They are graded on a transcript against a published rubric, reported entirely apart from every figure, and if the transcription step is unavailable they are taken out of the count and the report says so rather than scoring you nothing.
Nothing here promises you a raise, and nothing here tells you what you are worth. It tells you what your own moves cost, in an ordinary offer, on an ordinary afternoon.
What you walk away with
The share of what these moves could have cost you that you avoided, expressed against a respondent answering the way people actually answer, with the band drawn around it.
Conceding early, over-reaching, stalling and misreading, counted separately with the cost each one carried in this sitting.
Which mistake costs more is a judgement rather than a measurement, so the whole table is on the page and you can argue with one row of it.
For every keyed move you missed: what you reached for, what a stronger move contained, and the difference written out rather than implied.
Graded on a transcript against a published rubric and kept out of every figure, because speaking and writing are different acts and averaging them hides which one you can do.
Drawn from the part of the sitting where your moves cost the most, naming a specific situation and a specific behaviour.
Inside your report
Illustrative sample — your report is generated from your own responses.
Not a percentage of right answers. The share of what these moves could have cost you that you avoided, against a respondent answering at the published priors.
The price list is printed on your report, because which mistake costs more is a judgement rather than a measurement and you should be able to argue with a specific row.
Accept it and ask for a review after six months instead.
Counter with a figure and one reason it is justified.
Yours gave something away that nobody had asked for yet. The stronger move keeps it and still moves the conversation on.
The difference is written out, not just the model answer. That is the part a person can actually use.
Built for
- Anybody with an offer in hand who has never negotiated one
- Professionals preparing to ask for a raise or a re-band
- Contractors and freelancers setting a rate for the first time
- Career coaches and outplacement teams who want a measurement rather than a workshop
Find out what your own moves cost, before an offer does
40 exercises across six formats · about 40 minutes · a cost score with its band, an error profile, the price list printed, and three counters graded on the transcript.
₹649 (incl. GST) · assessment and full report, nothing further to pay
Frequently asked questions
A test. There is no video, no template pack and no script to memorise. Forty exercises put you inside an ordinary offer and hand back what your own decisions cost, which is the thing a course cannot tell you.
Because a percentage of right answers treats every mistake as the same size, and in a pay conversation they are not. Conceding early costs money for years; over-reaching costs a little credibility and very rarely the offer. Your score is the share of the available cost you avoided, against a respondent answering at the published priors.
No. Skipping them removes them from the count rather than scoring them zero. If you do them, they are graded on a transcript against a rubric printed on the report and reported entirely apart from every other figure.
No, and it does not try. It measures the decisions you make in a negotiation, not the market for your role. What you are worth is a research question about your market; this is a measurement about you.
About forty minutes for forty exercises. ₹649 in India, inclusive of GST, or US$6.99 elsewhere, one time, for the sitting and the full report.
Each one takes a single capability, puts you inside the situations where it is actually tested, and scores your choices against published evidence — with a report designed for that capability alone, not a template. They span hiring, compliance, education, operations and personal skill.
Browse the catalogue →Methodology: Forty original exercises across six formats: fourteen most-and-least forced-choice blocks, eight single-best moves, five select-every-that-applies items, six keyed claims, four numeric estimates and three spoken counters. Construct statement: it measures the decisions a person makes when negotiating their own pay - whether a reservation point and a defensible range are settled before a figure is named, how the figure is put into the room, whether the levers outside base salary are used, and what happens when a position has to be held. It does not measure what a person is worth in any market, whether a particular request will succeed, how likeable they are, or how they would negotiate on somebody else's behalf. Declared response instruction, one for the whole keyed spine: behavioural tendency - what you would actually do or say, not what a textbook would advise. The keyed-claim, estimate and spoken exercises are reported as separate strands with their own instructions and are kept out of the composite. Scoring is a decision-cost matrix: each option carries a cost by error class - conceding early, over-reaching, stalling and misreading - priced by what that error costs in that situation, and the published figure is the share of the cost avoided against a respondent answering at the authored priors rather than against a perfect score. The two poles of every forced choice carry separate authored priors, because the option almost nobody would say first is not the option most people would refuse. Keying draws on the convergent evidence rather than one framework: Galinsky and Mussweiler on first offers as anchors; Huffmeier and colleagues' meta-analysis of first-offer effects; Mason, Lee, Wiley and Ames on precise versus round anchors; Loschelder and colleagues on precision and counter-offer size; Ames and Mason on multiple equivalent offers and bolstering ranges; Fisher and Ury on alternatives away from the table; Van Poucke and Buelens on aspiration and reservation points; Malhotra and Bazerman on packaging and simultaneous offers; Marks and Harold on negotiating strategies and salary outcomes; Bowles, Babcock and Lai on the social cost of asking and the framings that reduce it; Leibbrandt and List on explicit negotiability and who initiates; Curhan, Elfenbein and Xu on subjective value and the relationship after the deal; Thompson on preparation and the reservation point; Barry and Friedman on individual differences in distributive outcomes. All items are original works written for this instrument and reproduce no commercial instrument's content or name.