Negotiations rarely enter people’s minds prior to receiving an offer. Aspirants often focus elsewhere—on gaining hands-on experience, compiling a strong academic portfolio, preparing for the interview process, etc. Negotiation methods are seldom flagged as important at these stages; so little groundwork goes into them as a result.
The truth of the matter is this: if you pay mind to the negotiation process only once you’ve reached the offer stage, you’re already behind the curve. Leverage for this phase is assembled on the way up, in the seemingly innocuous choices that compound over the years. A successful negotiation is set up through the long game; you need to accumulate clout before you can wield it.
Who Is This For?
While I would like to leave you with the impression that building leverage through the long game benefits candidates at all phases of their professional careers, this is particularly geared toward those in the early stages of career development. Beginning before you even enter the job market is optimal.
If you’re well into your working life, don’t fret; there’s a variant of this extended strategy that applies to you. But more on that later. The highest-yielding version of this is the one executed early.
What’s In and Out of Your Control
A good starting block for the long game is to sort variables into two opposing categories: those you can and can’t control. The job market, other candidates’ qualifications, whether or not your variety of experience or area of research fits a company’s job description and organizational requirements—these are all things outside of your control. In fact, we typically don’t even control the time at which we’re on the market. You could be freshly laid off, between jobs, or on the brink of graduation; one’s authority over such circumstances is minute. The only real control you have is consolidated in the upstream choices that compound over the years.
The Long-Game Chain
The long-game chain begins sooner than many anticipate; it looks something like this: high school grades → undergraduate program → undergraduate and/or master’s thesis → working under your professors or other scholars → the graduate program → publications. Each stage feeds into and defines the next. For example, the research you conduct in graduate school determines the number of first- and second-author papers you produce and the venues of your publications. However, in research-focused positions, your h-index holds more weight than raw citation count.
Though the specific role you want to fill might still appear hazy to you, you’ll want to consider your options as soon as possible, so as to focus your objective. In this pursuit, it helps to know the roles/job titles available to you. In AI, you have: research scientist, research engineer, applied scientist, machine-learning engineer, software engineer, and data scientist. A master’s degree will suffice for engineering-related roles, but if you wish to conduct research, completing a PhD is practically indispensable. Software engineering candidates, too, can be edged out by those with doctorates. So, having a rough idea of what you’d like to do will help you plan accordingly.
Do “Top” Schools Matter?
The clout that we assign to the nation’s most prestigious universities—Berkeley, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, MIT—is accepted without much deliberation. We draw a line of causation between universities’ rankings and the caliber of students’ ensuing careers, understanding little of the actual valuation system. Here’s the mechanism:
Advisor & Lab: Research is a kind of apprenticeship, so the standing of your particular advisor and lab can both strengthen you and immerse you in a more distinguished network.
Venue Access: “Top” schools have the computational resources, collaborators, and reputation to funnel papers into renowned venues. The school simply provides access to this pipeline.
Peers: Your peers will be engaging in pioneering research; this milieu naturally raises your competency and co-author network.
Recruiter Signal: Frontier labs recruit from institutions they trust; these programs’ pedigree is a costly-to-fake bypass that lessens a recruiter’s uncertainty.
Resources & Alumni: Access to computational resources, ample funding, and alumni who can also provide referrals.
But one’s ability to secure an elite vocation is not necessarily contingent on whether or not they’ve been fortunate enough to attend such an establishment. A school is merely a proxy for the mechanism it supplies. It represents the merit of its advisors, peers, and publication and networking contacts. Replicate this apparatus—cutting-edge work, credible collaborators, processing resources—and you reproduce the value of the institution without the appellation.
Internships
Internships serve a dual purpose: they supply accreditation of your experience and enlarge your network. Like the idiomatic expression “it’s not what you know, but who you know,” knowing the “right” person to help get your foot in the door is the secret to landing a high-paying industry role. This is especially true if Big Tech is your target; even more so if your variety of research inclines toward theory, rather than application.
Yet such ties are uncommon among new graduates; internships erect pathways that act as conductors for these connections.
The Rescue Path
If you’re already on the job market and “missed” the window for the long game, there are near-term methods through which you may roughly imitate this process and/or its fruits.
Provide evidence of the scope and quality of your work: A well-documented GitHub, duplications of notable papers or original projects, or technical writing samples that illustrate your mental processes.
Alternative entry points that don’t rely on the long-game ideal: Fellowships, industry post-docs, or maneuvering internally, such that you ascend the corporate ladder over time. For example, by advancing from software engineer to ML engineer, to research engineer, then research scientist, through a painstaking work ethic, of course.
If you happen to lack the background essential to the role you aspire to, you can either earn the credential academically or collaborate on others’ papers, which is itself a form of networking.
Cold-starting with Zero Network
If you’re still pre-career-search, but lack the network commonly required to gain a foothold, there are other ways to make connections.
Ground zero is to establish self-awareness. Decipher: the kinds of issues you wish to find solutions for, how you have solved similar issues in the past, and the goals of the organization—and more specifically, the team—you’re targeting. You want to have a clear sense of who you are, what you’ve accomplished, and what you can do for the individual/company you’re approaching.
Next, identify who to contact: Search for the recruiters and hiring managers who fill these positions through platforms like LinkedIn. Contact them through LinkedIn or email, but if you’re reaching out via LinkedIn, don’t connect with them using a note, as this can read “sales-y.” You can add context to your message later.
It helps to triage your targets by first, second, third choice, and so on, then lay out the number and types of connections you have at each company. Some connections will be, for lack of a better word, warmer than others. Your partner, close friends, advisors, and the colleagues you work alongside regularly—these are your warmest leads. Your coldest ones are the places at which you have zero connections. Then there are those that land somewhere in the middle. You may, for example, know a “friend of a friend” who works at such a place; rely on your intermediary in this case.
Cold-networking requires a certain degree of shamelessness. Approaching people you don’t know can feel presumptuous, but it's fundamental in building connections where there aren’t any. This is exactly the purpose of LinkedIn! When searching for business contacts, look for commonalities. Maybe you studied at the same university or worked in the same lab; these shared experiences make great conversation starters. Learn enough about them that, even if you don’t have any of these parallels, you can open a conversation with something of interest to them.
The initial, cold message is do-or-die. Recruiters spend roughly 6 to 7 seconds reviewing a resume, and a single-handed application seldom filters through the ATS; so your opening remarks must be compelling enough to stop a recruiter in their tracks. This is what—from the receiving end—works: The candidate reaching out to them has kept it short, to-the-point, and undoubtedly done their homework on them and their organization; they get their name right, outline their dilemma, and conceive of a solution. Your introductory statement should be merely one line and look something like this: “I’m a researcher at [school] working on [topic] with [advisor].” Then state who you are, what you can do for them, why this is applicable, and your reason for contacting them (whether you’re newly on the market, between jobs, or even laid off; people respect the hustle!). You can curate your LinkedIn algorithm by interacting with posts from those hiring at your target companies. This way, your feed—and your own visibility—gets shaped toward them.
Conclusion
The common thread through each of these jumping-off points is abundance over scarcity. Never lead with what you lack; lead with what you can provide. There’s almost always a path into the job you aspire to most: a lower position, a fellowship, a collaboration, a well-placed message. The long game rewards those who begin early; yet it’s never as finite as it appears.
