Please help me! I was interviewing with a very good organisation for the last few weeks. All went well and they want to hire me. Also, I am going from a smaller organisation to a bigger organisation. In the smaller organisation, the base (fixed) salary was deliberately kept low to minimise fixed costs.However, yesterday they came back with an offer which was quite underwhelming to say the least: the base as well as OTE bonus is lower than my current earnings.Their logic is that I should be looking at long term earning and progress within the company rather than a few K£ now. I believe they expect me to come over for the glory of the company alone, it seems!I believe if I accept these starting terms, I would be severly damaging my leverage in the long term.Has this happened to anyone? what was your decision? did you decline the offer or sucked up?

Declined the offer. went to somebody who was interested in my current AND long term benefit

Perplexed - two points. Firstly this is a very candidate short market, every consultancy is struggling to meet their recruitment targets so this really isn&apos;t an environment in which your negotiating hand is so weak that you have to accept this. I would take this as their opening position and negotiate upwards. If they will not play ball then plenty of other firms will.Secondly, so you can make a more informed decision, do download yourself a copy of the <a href=http://www.top-consultant.com/salary_report_2006.pdf target=_blank>2006 salary benchmarking report</a> - the data is a few months out of date now but still will give you a very good picture of the package you should be able to command.Hope that helps and good luck with the negotiations.Tony Restell (Top-Consultant.com)