I signed my offer the same day it arrived — a colleague on my team waited, and got £4,500 more

Personal account · Published October 2026 · 7 min read

The offer landed on a Thursday afternoon: £29,000, standard benefits, start date in a month. I read it once, felt relieved, and replied before I'd finished my coffee. It was a marketing coordinator role at a mid-sized agency in Leeds — my first move up from an assistant title, and the number felt entirely fair to me at the time.

A colleague from the same hiring round — same job title, same team, same opening offer of £29,000 — took a week longer to confirm. It wasn't until our first six-month review, when our manager mentioned "where everyone sits on the band" almost in passing, that the two of us compared notes over lunch afterwards. His contract said £33,500. Same letter. Same start date. A £4,500 gap that, as far as I could tell, had nothing to do with either of our CVs.

What he actually did between the offer and the contract

It wasn't dramatic. He didn't threaten to walk, and he didn't have a rival offer waiting. He replied to HR asking for a short call, said the number was lower than his own research into similar Leeds roles suggested, and named a figure roughly £4,500 above the original offer. HR came back three days later with £33,500. That was, in full, the negotiation.

I didn't do any of that — not because I didn't think about it, but because it genuinely didn't occur to me that the number in the letter was a starting point rather than a final one. (Personal account, one workplace. Individual results vary, and this isn't a claim about any specific employer or industry.)

"Staying quiet wasn't caution. It was just a conversation nobody had ever actually shown me how to start."

The comment that changed how I saw it

A few months later, over lunch with the wider team, a colleague — Elena, who'd moved to Leeds from Spain about a year before and had spent her first few years there working in recruitment before moving into marketing — mentioned something almost in passing: "In my last job, nobody signs the first number. You're expected to come back with something." She wasn't trying to make a point. She genuinely hadn't clocked that this wasn't the norm everywhere. It was normal to her. It wasn't to me.

The skill I'd underestimated for years

Here's what I got wrong early on: I treated the offer letter as a decision someone else had already made, rather than the opening line of a conversation I was entitled to join. In a lot of UK workplaces, a counter to a first offer is close to standard practice — recruiters build room for it into the number they send first. A 2022 Reed.co.uk survey of 2,000 UK jobseekers found that 51% had never negotiated a salary when offered a job^[1]. None of this is really about confidence — it's a structured exchange of information: what the role is worth, what you bring to it, what the other side can actually move on. That's learnable the way any structured conversation is learnable.

What I know now that I didn't back then

An offer letter is a starting position, not a verdict on what you're worth — and a well-researched counter is simply expected, not pushy. I learned most of the structure from the course below.

A note on advertising: this article includes a recommendation for a third-party course, for which I may receive a commission. My personal experience is genuine, but results can vary from person to person. Nothing here is professional, legal, financial or employment advice. Individual results vary.

Rania Clarke
Blogger · Rania Studio · Leeds