Business Insider not too long ago, I had a reporter call me up and say, hey, John, let's talk about Elon Musk's negotiation strategy with Tesla.

The same situation, but with a very different person.

You know, Elon Musk is going to the Tesla board saying, I want a $1 trillion pay package.

And if you don't give it to me, I'm going to walk.

And so the question was, should the average person use that strategy? My response was, well, the average person is not Elon Musk.

He has a unique set of leverage that he can pull.

But then a turning point came during your own salary negotiation for another role soon after that.

Yeah, most people that are interviewing for a job do feel that the balance of power is not with them most of the time.

Unless you're going into a negotiation with multiple offers in your hand, you really feel like, wow, I'm a beginner at this.

I don't have the experience that the other person has that I'm talking to because most of the time you're talking – With somebody like me, you know, I've been a career recruiter.

I started recruiting in 1990.

So I've been doing it a long time and I might extend five, six offers a week.

And so I'm doing that on the regular and also with somebody else's money.

How is all this different for a what we'll call an internal negotiation? Let's say moving up to a different position in the same company, but you're doing a new negotiation.

So, John, do you recall a moment in your youth that may have shaped the rest of your life when it was a moment or a person that left a positive mark on you?

Yeah, yeah, actually, yeah.

The thing that strikes me the most is probably a story when I was early in my career and I was moving from Portland, Oregon, all the way to Richmond, Virginia, which is about as far away from Oregon as you can be and still be in the United States.

That was a huge move.

And I'd always lived in Oregon for my whole lifetime, was born, raised here, and eventually just leapt into the Fortune 500.

But this was a pivotal experience because I was interviewing with Capital One Financial, and they had the most difficult and challenging pay negotiation process and interview and selection process that I'd ever seen anywhere.

And it was exciting for me.

Before you decided to step into becoming salary coach, what was it that made you realize that you could help executives get 10% to 20% more in compensation?

Can you change from that number, that 75,000?

Let's start there.

The answer is yes, you can, but it's difficult.

It's really difficult.

If you answer that question with that number, 75,000, they ask you the question, what's it going to take to get you? What are you looking for in terms of pay? What's your salary expectation? These are all ways of asking the same question, and you give a number like 75,000, what's going to happen is someone like me will put that number in a file, maybe even write it on your resume.

They'll send it off to the hiring manager, the person who is looking to fill a position, and they'll say, I think I can get Bob for $75,000.

And the hiring manager interviews you based on that information.

John, if you were to coach someone and say, here's that single negotiation tactic that will deliver the greatest return but is often overlooked by job seekers, what would that single negotiation tactic be? Well,

So why is this so hard for us?

Sure, well, I think it's hard for hiring managers because they are concerned that they might have to go back to the square one again.

Vacancies are expensive for a company.

They're expensive for a leader too because now you've got people doing multiple jobs.

You have complaints coming in from your short-staffed group.

There's all kinds of pressure on hiring leaders to fill vacancies quickly and to fill them with good people.

One of the things that a hiring leader is afraid of the most is picking the wrong person.

no.