Does Your Salary History Really Matter to a Future Employer?

Your salary history tells an important story of how far you've come along a career path, so it's fitting that a prospective employer might be interested in learning more about your past earnings. Yet it's unfair to take a salary history at face value, because there are so often back-stories that need explaining.

Career experts say you should be prepared to discuss your salary history with a prospective employer, along with any back-stories. For example, if you changed careers and took a pay cut in the process, you'll want to share that. Still you don't want to put yourself at a disadvantage, so it's important to tailor your approach to the circumstances.

How to Handle Salary Requirements When Applying for a Job

Job interviewing is like art: it requires skill, dexterity, and the right tools and environment. Make one wrong move and the result can be disastrous. This is especially true when it comes to discussing salary requirements. As a job-seeker, approaching a conversation with a prospective employer about salary requirements can be tricky.

How soon can you expect an employer to ask you about your salary requirements? Should you ever include salary requirements in a cover letter? How can you pick a salary that doesn't aim too high or too low?

To find sage answers to these and other basic questions about salary requirements, I tapped several career experts for their wisdom.

Salary Negotiation in Tough Times: What Not to Do

The U.S. fiscal climate is going from bad to worse, with Wall Street firms crumbling and unemployment edging ever higher. All this makes for an uneven landscape for salary negotiations, which aren't easy even during a robust economy. To succeed with salary negotiations in tough times, experts say workers should definitely avoid certain tactics.

Holly Weeks, author of “Failure To Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong And What You Can Do To Right Them," says it's important not to cop a combative stance during salary negotiations. She explains: " ... the typical approach is to think of this as warfare, there will be a winner and loser, someone is one up, usually the boss is one up, and the worker is one down." But turning a salary negotiation into a battlefield isn't an effective strategy, so you shouldn't be combative, or assume your manager will be.

"At the same time, it’s possible your counterpart will shift into a combat mentality. So you will have to think about ways of handling the conversation unilaterally instead of assuming [your boss] will meet you half-way," Weeks says.