Thor – sorry can’t help with 1) and 3) – you need an insider at Bain to provide factual info.In terms of negotiation there is always room to manoeuvre, but with such a high basic salary already achieved and no experience of selling advisory services to justify a manager position you may end up in a position very similar to that of the OP in thread 68987. He was applying to McK – I suggest you read the thread in its entirety – its one of the higher quality ones on here and a number of regular contributors provided lots of good advice and commentary very pertinent to your situation.In the meantime, I’ve pasted my advice to the guy with the same dilemma below….(For those who might think that I am a complete geek for remembering a thread from months ago, my only defence is that my entire career has been based on a fantastic memory making up for no actual talent)--------------------------DONT EVER SAY "NO THANKS" AND GET NOTHING OUT OF IT! Good luck with your difficult, but nice-to-have dilemma. Can I suggest that if you are edging towards staying put that you have a discussion with your contact at McK in the form of asking their own advice. Make it clear how impressed you’ve been with the firm and their staff. Admit that you’d love to work in such an intelligent and high-achieving environment. Make it clear that the only problem is money, and that while you have no problem with the principle of taking a cut in order to invest for the future, the SIZE of the cut in this instance would simply have too much of an adverse effect on your personal finances. (I’d recommend that you couch it this way – not that you do not WISH to make the investment, but that you CANNOT make the investment; that given your existing financial commitments, the reduction would more or less immediately catapult you into debt. Within months you’d be happy in your work, but unable to pay your bills!). Stress that you understand why McK cannot possibly bring you in at Manager level (where you would then earn enough), but directly ask “assuming I do not join, what would I need to achieve in the next 2-3 years to be reconsidered for hiring but at a higher level, where the financial impact could be less, or at the least, I could prepare for it”. The principle here (and it may be worth articulating this directly as well) is that “at this minute I recognise that I’m more valuable to my employer than I am to McK. What do I do to ensure that my value to McK catches up with my value to other firms”. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with gently and sub-consciously reminding the hirer, that you’re highly valued by the very people that should be McK clients. Hopefully the hiring director will at the very least mark you down as someone to stay in touch with, and it’s no bad thing to have a direct line of this nature. The “McK network” does not have to be limited to employees and alumni? Of course there is an outside chance that they’ll be so impressed that they’ll close the financial gap enough to make the decision to join them, but the real probability is that you get to keep the door open for another discussion down the road.
