Jason Blais: From the Recruiting Front Lines

Negotiation of strategic partnerships. That’s how I spend a considerable amount of my days and evenings.  To be an effective negotiator in  my field, it is important that I create situations where at least three separate parties, all with unique desires, goals, and levels of engagement, all feel good about the realized results.  The primary active parties are my company and the partner I’m negotiating with, both of whom wish to drive revenue or enhance their value in some manner. This is a normal paradigm for negotiation.  The third and/or fourth parties that I balance are the job seekers who rely on our service to find jobs, and the employers who advertise with us to attract the best candidates.  This is where things get tricky.

There are a few situations that come up repeatedly as I explore partnership opportunities.  I’m willing to bet that these conditions come up routinely in all industries at all levels, during negotiations.  Here’s what I commonly encounter:

A potential partner provides a service that could be of instant and substantial financial gain to both the partner and my company, but will create a significant negative experience for our users (job seekers and/or employers)

A potential partner provides a quality enhancement for our users, but with prohibitive costs to us.

A potential partner would like to work with us in a manner that would enhance our user experience, but is unwilling or unable to provide reasonable monetary or non-monetary value to us.

This is also where we find the myth of business partnerships.  The myth being the belief that two parties can come together to create value for a third party, with neither side incurring costs.  That somehow there are ideal partners out there where each entities offerings and desires are an exact complimentary match to each other- a Yin and Yang, where both sides hold equal stake.

Yin and Yang from Taoism.About.com

In every negotiation that has every happened in the past, and in every negotiation that will ever happen in the future, there will be one party that makes out better, and one that makes out worse.  In my experience, great negotiation is the ability to create a scenario where the party that makes out worse, still walks away in a better position than when they started, and ideally with even better results than they were originally willing to accept as bottom-line.

As my experience has grown, I have learned to identify which of the three scnarios highlighted above is most likely to be where the process begins when exploring new partnerships opportunities.  The key here, in my mind, is truly to get to this point as quickly as possible.  The sooner we can encounter the obstacle, the sooner we can work to overcome it. I believe that understanding which of the three I’m facing allows me to negotiate more effectively, and more efficiently create circumstances that result in favorable results.