Issue 29 · Thursday, 30 July 2026
Skipped last week. A pipe under the kitchen decided otherwise. Back now.
There is a piece of arithmetic that hiring managers know and candidates mostly do not. Filling a role from outside costs an employer somewhere between a fifth and a third of first-year salary once you count agency fees, the manager hours spent interviewing, and the four to seven months before the new person is producing at the level they were hired for. Filling it from inside costs a conversation and a start date.
That gap is your leverage, and almost nobody uses it, because internal moves feel like asking a favour rather than making a trade.
In my experience it is almost never the receiving manager. It is the manager you are leaving, who is now short a person, has no budget to backfill until the next planning cycle, and whose numbers get worse the moment you go. This is the whole problem, and it has a shape you can work with.
The move that works is to solve their problem before you present yours. Not “I would like to move to the platform team”, but “I would like to move to the platform team in October, the handover is these four things, two of them Priya already shadows, and I have written down the other two.” You have converted a loss into a scheduled, staffed departure. Managers can approve a schedule. They cannot approve a hole.
An internal transfer at the same level usually comes with a small adjustment or nothing at all, on the theory that the level has not changed. That is defensible. What is not defensible, and what you should push on, is a transfer into a role that was posted externally with a band. If the requisition existed, the band existed, and the band is what an outside hire would have been offered. You are not asking for a raise; you are asking to be paid the posted rate for the posted job. Say it that plainly and it becomes very hard to argue with.
Ask for the requisition number. Ask whether the role was posted, and at what level. If it was, ask where in the band an external candidate would have landed. Some of the time you will be told. Being told is worth more than any amount of general negotiation.
Do not resign your current role until the transfer is documented somewhere other than a verbal agreement between two managers. Reorganisations are fast and memories are short.
And give the new team a genuine ninety days before you judge it. Internal movers consistently underestimate how much of their competence was context rather than skill. That is not a reason to stay put. It is a reason to expect a quiet quarter and not to read it as a mistake.
Written by Nadia Prewitt. Every issue goes to the list first and lands here a day or two afterwards. There is no tracking pixel in the email and there is none on this page; if you want me to know you read it, tell me.