Hi, Pablo here
One efective but risky way to find the top budget for the vacancy
I've seen a lot of people frustrated with not knowing how much a company is willing to pay for a vacancy. There are multiple ways to find out, which you probably are familiar with if you've been job hunting for some time.
But it's only fair that some folks don't know how to get this done. I find job hunting has a lot of in common with dating and finding a partner. Three things they have in common are (1) almost all of us have to go through it, (2) it's very important for us and we're stressed out about succeding or fluking it and (3) when we start out, we know nothing about how to do our part properly.
In case this helps you, I'm going to explain you one very simple, quite effective, and very risky way to find out. Before you do this, you should probably try the also simple, a lot safer but not always that effective option of simply asking the owner of the vacancy straight away.
So, if that first approach that has failed, this is what I propose instead: provide your compensation expectations, and make them outlandish. For example, let's say you suspect their range must be something like 100-120K. Then, you go and ask 200K. At this stage, most recruiters will go "Oooh, I'm afraid yadiyada that's too much", and in their justification as to why you're too expensive, they will usually confess what's the top of the range, moment in which you should avoid yelling "Aha! That's the salary eh!".
It could be that you go for the 200K and the recruiter just says "Okay, that's fine". In this case, you have failed in exceeding the top, which means you're either pathologically humble, quite misinformed about where the market is at, or maybe both. I guess you still can be happy that you are apparently worth something that you feel is outlandish. Ego boost!
On the other hand, if you do manage to exceed their budget, the good news is you'll probably get to know what it is. The bad news is, if you have exceeded their budget by leaps and bounds, you might have a lot of trouble backtracking your stance and convincing them that you're willing to settle for their top (if you are truly interested, that is). This makes this technique exciting and somewhat similar to blackjack: you want to make sure you overstep the top of the range, but you want to do it by the smallest margin possible to keep your options open.
For the shy ones: I promise nobody is going to laugh at you or get mad because of yourinsanely high request. It's very likely the recruiter spends its days receiving numbers crazier than yours thrown at them by wackos who are unfit for the vacancy but are just trying their luck. Actually, if you're a really good candidate and they like you, they might start doubting themselves and whether they're being too stingy.
If they do get irritated about it, congratulations! They are idiots and you have managed to find out before you married them, which is going to make your life much easier!
Good luck with the job hunt.