Recruiters Shared The Most Impressive Things They’d Ever Seen New Hires Negotiate In Their Contracts

I’ve always been continuously impressed by my friends who have moved from company to company throughout their careers and have managed to negotiate bigger and better contracts at every step. I’m a creature of habit and have stayed put most of my adult life, but I am still fascinated by people who are willing to make ludicrous demands when negotiating a new contract. Below we’ve got a bunch of HR and recruiters sharing the most impressive and memorable things they’ve ever seen negotiated into a contract, and if you bros are on the hunt for a new job then you should really consider fighting for some of this stuff (especially things like getting the Friday and Monday off after your team’s biggest football game of the year).


ElectronicWanderlust:
Not that amazing, but since there’s no replies in this thread yet:
I had a senior engineer who was a HUGE college football fan actually negotiate to add a clause in his contract guaranteeing the Friday before and the Monday after the Iron Bowl as paid days off (not to count against his other allotted vacation time). I was surprised they agreed to it.


crademaster:
Their father’s birthday. They only wanted the birthday for that one year, because his father was terminally ill. We were a relatively small organization, we agreed, and he seemed legitimately shocked that we had said yes so easily and he almost teared up (it was at the end of the interview). Dude was a great employee, I think he still works there.


RetardedDropBear:
I own a recruitment firm (executive search) for tech companies.
I placed a guy in the biggest SaaS vendor going around. He’s a senior sales guy.
No candidate should ever do the negotiating, they will usually fuck it up. This guy was a special case and I trusted him. He negotiated such a huge stock package, the only person with a bigger RSU package was the CEO, country manager included.
He even negotiated personal stocks for me as a favour. That was fucking unbelievable


Rothead:
I remember one director getting paid a salary of £100,080 which seemed to be solely so that he could go around saying his salary was over £100k.


somuchfeels:
I live in the mountains and I knew a guy who had a ‘powder day clause’ in his contract that involved a day off to ski/snowboard if we had over 30cm of new snow overnight. Livin the Dream.


topagae:
Months of free pay. Guy was a citizen but he kept having his wives visa held up and she was 9 months pregnant. Didn’t show up.for months due to these complications and threatened to quit of he didn’t get regulat salary. So they just paid him for the 3 or 4 months it took for him to get his shit together. Mother fucker even got his quarterly bonus despite never having actually started to work.


Hand_ME_the_keys:
My brother-in-law negotiated for 12 weeks leave per year where the standard is 4. I incredulously asked him how he did it and he said something like ‘you’ve got to know when to push and when to concede’. Dude is part fucking Jedi I swear.


technos:
A company I worked for hired a new sales guy who was nutso for coffee.
As part of his contract the company had to buy and install a commercial espresso machine (model and brand of his choosing), grinder and beans dispenser in every break room. He also got a monthly budget for coffee and supplies.
I thought I’d seen all the entitled dot-com activity at that point, so I went out for beer with the HR lady that had been on the other side of the negotiating table and asked her about it.. She laughed..
He could’ve had fifty [thousand dollars] in sign-on and another twenty-five a year. Instead he got ten in coffee makers and two a year in beans.


DoctorFlimFlam:
I was doing prelim screening via phone for several candidates. Think of it like a mini phone interview to weed out the obvious weirdos or people who have blatantly padded a résumé and aren’t really qualified. One guy stopped me mid sentence to inform me that in order to continue with the interview(I was just screening at this point), our company would have to pay him $50. I was not impressed, but it did stand out


kanemano:
New guy asks for a a pay rate of 80, employer assumes he means per hour not per annum, guy doubles he paycheck without breaking a sweat.


WaywardVagabong:
Not that impressive, but i had one Maintenance engineer as for 72k plus it had to be door to door, plus it had to have a car and also 30 days holiday. He said he wouldn’t take anything less.
I continued through my questions and asked about his current employment, he told me he was currently between jobs because he just couldn’t find the right one.
He was basically looking for diamonds in a wood work store


4dogs4cats1goodlife:
50k salary, two weeks vacation, 30 hour work week


gleenglass:
I don’t know if this counts but another department head of the government that I work for called me over for what I had annoyingly assumed would be legal advice (without an appointment!) and sat me down when I arrived and asked how much money I was making. I kind of thought that was rude but pay disparity has been an issue here so I told him. He then asked how much money I wanted to make and then I realize this conversation was a job offer. I tossed out a number 22% above my then current pay range and equal to the assistant department head position. He said “ok.”
And then I wished I had asked for more money because the benefits and vacay around here are already pretty dang good.


Flowseidon9:
Had a guy that was applying to be a Director of Finance say that he would only accept that job if we promised not to do a credit check. Then tried to assure us there wouldn’t be a problem with his credit.


weston4321:
Corporate Recruiter here. This happen two weeks ago. I was discussing when a applicant could come in and get started with my company. This is when the applicant said “I need to know when you will tell my company that I am leaving.” After getting him to repeat himself it hit me that this guy wanted me to call his company and tell them he is leaving. I quickly pulled my offer.


excusemefucker:
A company car. No travel was/is required for work for this guy at all. He gets a new car every 2 years. He’s not had his own vehicle in probably 12 years at this point. They cover maintenance and insurance. He gets a free car.
I texted and asked, he is wrapping up a lease on a Cadillac CTS and he said it looks like he’s getting a new impala come September. I have no idea what he gets paid, but fuck him for not having to worry about a car.


SirWandsworth:
I work for a human rights foundation where the people have crazy entitlement issues.
One lady from Eastern Europe we offered a job in New York but her visa got denied. While we worked out the issue with the government we had her start work in budapest. Now, Budapest has seriously low cost of living and labour in comparison to New York so we offered her the Budapest salary until she eventually moved to NYC when we would bump it up to NYC salary. She had already rented out an apartment in New York before getting her visa (didn’t think that was even possible) so she managed to negotiate working in Budapest on a New York salary (four times what Budapest staff she sits next to are earning), plus double relocation to each country and accommodation for the entire time she’s in Budapest. Personally, I would have said no, she was stupid enough to rent an apartment without having a visa that’s her problem.
Another one, as part of our relocation package we offer 2 weeks accommodation in either our corporate apartment or a hotel in the countries we don’t have one. Hired a woman who had to move across country to New York and the corporate apartment wasn’t free so we put her up in a relatively nice hotel. She didn’t like the air conditioning in her room but rather than speak to the hotel desk, she called up our HR team and demanded she get moved to another hotel and she needed four weeks now not two. $30,000 later and she’s staying a month in one of he nicest hotels in Manhattan.
I have so many stories, but the surprising thing is that they are mostly from staff in New York, European offices aren’t so bad.


Callmebobbyorbooby:
I’m not sure if this counts or is really too special, but I used to recruit SAP and Oracle professionals who would travel from all over the country to work in the DC area. These guys would negotiate anywhere from $140 per hour to $200 per hour. I almost shit a brick when I found out how much they can make. That rate also doesn’t include having all their meals and hotel paid for.


desmando:
I asked for a $120k car. They gave me $150k in stock instead.


Alright, bros, I hope you’ve got some good ideas in your heads for the next time you sit down to negotiate a new or existing contract. Nobody is going to give you what you don’t ask for, not in the real world, so you might as well aim high, right?

All of these responses came from a thread over on AskReddit, and you can read through more of them by clicking HERE. I also invite you bros to share your personal experience with this topic down below in the comments and/or over in the FB comments, assuming you have any valuable insight in this area.

FWIW, I think everyone should get their contract negotiation advice from 30 Rock‘s Jack Donaghy:

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Cass Anderson is the Editor-in-Chief of BroBible. Based out of Florida, he covers an array of topics including NFL, Pop Culture, Fishing News, and the Outdoors.