It’s worth noting that the average answers to “How much financial compensation would you expect to need to receive to make you indifferent about that role not being filled?” were $272,222 (junior) and $1,450,000 (senior).
And so I think that just quoting the willingness to pay dollar amounts to hire top over second-preferred candidate can be a bit misleading here, because it’s not obvious to everyone that WTP amounts are typically much higher than salaries in general in this context. If the salary is $70k, for instance, and the org’s WTP to hire you over the second-preferred candidate $50k, it would be a mistake to infer that you are perceived as 3.5 times more impactful.
Another way of reading this is that the top hire is perceived as about 23% and about 46% more ‘impactful’ respectively than the second-preferred hire in WTP terms on average. I think this is a more useful framing.
And then eyeballing the graphs, there is also a fair amount of variance in both sets of answers, where perceptions of top junior candidates’ ‘impactfulness’ appear to range from ~5–10% higher to ~100% higher than the second-best candidate. That suggests it is worth at least asking about replaceability, if there is a sensitive way to bring it up!
I agree that people worry too much about replaceability overall, though.
It’s worth noting that the average answers to “How much financial compensation would you expect to need to receive to make you indifferent about that role not being filled?” were $272,222 (junior) and $1,450,000 (senior).
And so I think that just quoting the willingness to pay dollar amounts to hire top over second-preferred candidate can be a bit misleading here, because it’s not obvious to everyone that WTP amounts are typically much higher than salaries in general in this context. If the salary is $70k, for instance, and the org’s WTP to hire you over the second-preferred candidate $50k, it would be a mistake to infer that you are perceived as 3.5 times more impactful.
Another way of reading this is that the top hire is perceived as about 23% and about 46% more ‘impactful’ respectively than the second-preferred hire in WTP terms on average. I think this is a more useful framing.
And then eyeballing the graphs, there is also a fair amount of variance in both sets of answers, where perceptions of top junior candidates’ ‘impactfulness’ appear to range from ~5–10% higher to ~100% higher than the second-best candidate. That suggests it is worth at least asking about replaceability, if there is a sensitive way to bring it up!
I agree that people worry too much about replaceability overall, though.