The Executive Recruitment market has been very busy for our clients, candidates and our coaches. This year kicked off at a frantic pace resulting in dozens of exciting Executive placements across the IT&T, Financial Services & Professional Services areas in the first quarter. A highlight of the last couple of months was our successful placement of a senior executive candidate into a Global Sales role, based in London for one of our rapidly expanding International clients.

We have been delighted with the success of our coaching business, which has led to the appointment of several new Executive Coaches who have joined the Amazing Results team in Sydney, Canberra and in Melbourne, as well as our recent appointed of Niki Cassidy as our Head of Coaching.

The team are looking forward to the start of the new financial year and hearing from you soon. I am sure we will all be very busy!

Negotiating your own salary package or a salary increase is one of the most challenging tasks that many of our Executive candidates face, and we are regularly asked for advice in this area.

Many companies are predicting strong demand for top talent in the second half of this year, and sharp increases in executive salaries are likely to follow.

Salary negotiation is a skill in its own right and in our experience, many Executives over-estimate their ability to negotiate their own salary, because they are very successful negotiators in other areas of their working and personal lives. Firstly, having accurate and reliable salary information which will help you to establish what your experience and talent is worth in the market is critical. Secondly, you need to establish what a company is prepared to pay for your talents and this can depend on a wide range of factors such as the position, the hiring person, the organisation itself, as well as your perceived value in the market.

We regularly work closely with senior executives as an independent advisor during salary negotiations, and we are seeing a trend towards using a Talent Agent who in some instances will step in to negotiate your package for you. Key points to remember when negotiating your salary package include:

• Delay and avoid discussions about salary as long as possible during the recruitment process. Until you are clear that the company is really keen to employ you, you are not in the strongest position to negotiate the best possible salary package.
• Leverage a wide variety of market research techniques to assess salaries and trends in your particular area of expertise.
• Think in total remuneration terms - remuneration takes into account salary and other benefits.
• Let the employer mention salary first, and have a clear idea of what your true value is before entering into salary discussions.

For confidential information please contact us about leveraging our services available in this area.

1. Undertake a full inventory of your major career accomplishments, achievements to date, and identify how you specifically contributed to those results. Useful tips: Don't narrow your focus on only your professional achievements. Incorporate your personal successes and acknowledge their importance in your career.
2. Identify your core competencies and skills, and make note which of your talents are currently under- utilized. Useful tips: Divide the list in skills you enjoy using and skills you have but do not enjoy using. Doing this will help you later in designing your "dream job" and filtering the choices.
3. Take the time to really understand what is important to you, what are your core values and develop a value proposition to communicate to prospective employers. Useful tips: Make sure you will look at how your personal values should be represented in the corporate values of the companies you might consider working for. If there is no match in values there'll be no match in expectations.
4. Develop a detailed career vision for yourself into the future, setting up short and longer terms goals. Useful tips: Once you have the short and long term goals in place take action. Having the goals is not enough, you need to have action plans to reach those goals together with well defined milestones to measure your success by along the way. They can help you fine-tune your actions if need be.
5. Define the "perfect" job that would fit with your values, skill set, expectations and requirements. Useful tips: This is your chance to design the job you would love going to every Monday and hate leaving Friday evenings. Mix and match until you get the amazing result.

Covering these key issues will allow you to develop the foundation for a much more focused and powerful career plan and job search program.

In conjunction with Full Circle Feedback, Amazing Results are now able to provide highly flexible, web- enabled 360-degree feedback software and processes. Our coaches have been trained in all aspects of the 360-degree feedback process and are now delivering successful 360 degree and coaching programs to some of our clients.

A 360 degree assessment is a very valuable process that helps individuals to significantly raise their awareness of their talents, strengths and values. It also helps to provide valuable perceptions, feedback and knowledge from others, which can then be used to prioritise an individual's development. For more information .