Alright everybody, what are good strategies for getting a good raise at review time? I've been with this place about a year and our yearly reviews are coming up. I have it on good authority that MyBoss is pretty tightfisted when it comes to these things. Any tips or strategies? Things that have worked? Things that haven't?

-- Anonymous, June 21, 2001

Answers

The best strategy I've seen work is when a friend of mine pulled together documentation of some of the work she'd done through the year and included copies of any letters clients had sent thanking her or praising her work. She put together a small package / folder of this work with a nice note, something along the lines of, "I've really enjoyed being here and the challenges we've had this year as a company. I know the yearly reviews are upon us and since we've done so much in this last year, I thought I'd put togehter samples of some of my work just FYI." Etc. She also included any stats she had handy which showed that a particular project (marketing / advertising) had been successful (or more successful than even hoped.) In her case, she knew her boss was going to be very harried at review time, so she did the package early and gave it to her boss about a week ahead of the review. It worked well -- it reminded the boss of some of her daily responsibilities which tended to go unnoticed and it also was evidence of her success and enjoyment of her job. She got a nice raise.

I know you don't want to look too much like a suck up in this kind of situation, and you don't want to annoy your co-workers by seeming too anal or officious, but having evidence either with you or right ahead of the review can help to concretize what you've done all year for your boss and justify your raise. It all depends on your relationship to your boss, of course, as to how you approach doing this (formally or informally, with humor or not), but I think it can't really hurt, since it is, specifically, review time. If you don't have the type of job where you have physical evidence of specific type of projects (maybe you're in support and you can't claim an entire project to yourself), I would think a good list of what types of things you've done and include any particular times you feel you either excelled or came up with the solution to a major concern or helped in some vital way which may not be as obvious when someone just looks back on the "whole" thing which was done.

Hope that helps.

-- Anonymous, June 21, 2001