Day: August 21, 2025

• Recruiter Brian Fink said people seeking jobs after a layoff often undersell themselves.
• Many assume that unemployment limits their ability to negotiate for a higher salary.
• Fink recommends using data and confidence to negotiate better compensation packages.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Brian Fink, an independent corporate recruiter in Alpharetta, Georgia, who previously worked in recruiting for tech giants such as Amazon, Apple, Twitter, and McAfee. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve been a corporate recruiter for more than two decades, and I’ve noticed that laid-off people often undersell themselves when talking about pay during the interview process.

For starters, many wrongly assume that being unemployed means they can’t negotiate for a higher salary than what they’ve been offered. If you have that mentality, change it.

Layoffs are business decisions, not personal indictments. What matters is what you bring to the table. Focus on the here and now and what you can do. Lead with your skills and results, not the layoff story, not woes me.

Another common flub is to start off discussing pay from a weak position by making comments such as: “I know that budgets are tight.” Don’t do that. Budgets are tight everywhere.

Instead, arm yourself with data before sitting in the hot seat. Look at sites like Glassdoor and Levels.fyi to get a sense of the average pay for the role you’re seeking in the geographic area where it’s located.

When you’re face-to-face with the interviewer, be the first to bring up compensation. You will be in a stronger position if you’re the one leading the conversation. Ask for the pay range to see if it aligns with the research you did. If it’s lower, say what you believe the correct range is, rather than sell yourself short. It’s possible the interviewer will offer to look into whether the pay can be adjusted.

Don’t just focus on base salary. Ask about the whole megillah — signing bonuses, annual bonuses, and paid time off. It’s about going deep and asking if there’s a professional-development budget. It’s also making sure that you’ve got the right title and scope for the role.

At this point, you should now be ready to negotiate. Speak in numbers, not feelings. There’s confidence in data, and confidence plus data is a cocktail that often is very palatable.

What you want to say is: “Based on what we just discussed and the impact that I bring, I’m targeting a compensation package of X.”

Then stop talking. Let the silence do the work. Filling the gap with nervous chatter will lead you to undercut yourself.

If the recruiter or hiring manager responds with a lower number, don’t immediately fold. Instead, ask: “Can you tell me how you arrived at that number?” You want them to ameliorate the situation by using their own data and their own words.

Keep in mind that hiring managers love speed. They think, ‘oh, somebody’s available! There’s no waiting period.’ That is leverage. Point out in the interview how you would be free to hit the ground running quickly since you don’t have to give a current employer the standard two weeks of notice.

There’s a misperception that recruiters get paid based on how much money they save a company and that they want job candidates to accept the lowest offer possible. In reality, we typically get bonuses if we hire a certain number of people per month. For example, at Amazon, I had to hire at least six people in that timeframe.

I recently interviewed a laid-off candidate for a sales job at a software company who told me she thought she was worth $215,000 in annual base salary. I said shoot for $230,000 when you meet with the hiring manager.

The candidate told me she didn’t think she could do it, so I asked her to stand up, put her hands on her hips, and invoke the Superman pose. I read in a book many years ago that doing this boosts confidence, and I think it works. The hiring manager ended up offering the candidate the $215,000 she was hoping to get, and she accepted the job.

Within hours of any mass shooting, high-profile murder, or targeted attack, a familiar speculation about the perpetrator’s mental state begins. Social media erupts with assumptions about psychiatric conditions. Defense attorneys prepare evaluations before anyone has even been assessed. The verdict is in before the facts: This person must be mentally ill.

This reflexive response serves a comforting, but dangerous, purpose. It gives perpetrators a framework for diminished responsibility. It also provides the rest of us with the reassuring fiction that such acts stem from a diagnosable condition rather than from the darker possibilities that exist within ordinary human behavior.

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As someone who performs psychiatric evaluations in forensic and correctional settings, I’ve assessed countless individuals who have committed acts of violence. What I’ve learned aligns with research. Only about 5% of all violent acts are committed by individuals with severe mental illness. In fact, individuals with severe mental illness are more likely to be victims than perpetrators.

Yet our collective response remains unchanged. By rushing to pathologize cruelty, we engage in psychological self-protection. It becomes far easier to sleep at night believing that the capacity for brutality resides in a distinct category of “sick” individuals than acknowledging that danger might live next door or share our bed.

This doesn’t mean mental illness never contributes to violence. In my practice, I’ve seen cases where untreated psychosis or mania were involved in violent behavior. These cases are real and tragic, but they represent the minority. The problem isn’t that mental illness is never relevant. It’s that we assume it always is.

Labeling violence a symptom of mental illness allows us to preserve the illusion that human nature is fundamentally pleasant, if not benign. If violence stems from mental illness, then it’s predictable and treatable. The perpetrator becomes a patient, not a moral agent. We maintain our illusions by medicalizing brutality. But that illusion comes at a cost.

I once evaluated a man who systematically disfigured a woman after she rejected him. He expressed no remorse, no confusion, and no psychiatric symptoms. Instead, he described a disgusting belief system in which women exist to serve men’s needs. When women violated that expectation, he believed they deserved punishment. His logic was heinously sexist but consistent. His values were monstrous.

These are the cases we struggle to face, not because they’re rare, but because they’re chillingly coherent. The most unsettling truth about violence is that it often derives from people whose cognitive functioning is perfectly intact. The reasoning works. It’s the moral code underneath that’s warped.

A person may flawlessly reason from the abhorrent belief that certain groups are subhuman or that humiliation justifies retaliation, or that a righteous cause excuses any means. We’re not always dealing with disordered thought. Sometimes, we’re dealing with deliberate justification.

In high-profile criminal proceedings, mental health evidence often dominates the narrative. The formal insanity defense succeeds in fewer than one percent of cases, but its visibility reinforces a flawed public perception that mental illness is a common driver of violence. It usually isn’t.

More concerning are diminished capacity defenses, which blur the line between explanation and excuse. Defense teams present histories of trauma, substance use, or personality disorders as mitigating factors, but correlation is not causation. Many people experience trauma without harming anyone. Others with relatively stable lives commit acts of extraordinary cruelty.

The limits of medical framing become clear when individuals who make violent threats online are diverted to psychiatric hospitals. But what, exactly, are we treating? I’ve evaluated people who were previously hospitalized after making threats and acquiring weapons. Their planning was detailed. Their reasoning was consistent within their twisted worldview. The brief hospitalization addressed neither their sense of grievance nor their belief that violence was justified. They were released not because they were no longer a danger to society, but because they no longer met legal criteria for mental illness commitment. Later, they ended up in my evaluation room at the jail anyway—after doing exactly what they had planned all along.

Part of the confusion is definitional. Poor mental health, marked by emotional distress, unhealthy coping, or relationship problems, is common. Mental illness refers to specific, diagnosable conditions with established clinical criteria. Conflating these concepts may feel compassionate, but it does neither science nor society any favors.

The rush to pathologize violence also reinforces stigma. It deepens the association between psychiatric illness and dangerousness, making it harder for people to seek care. The irony is sharp. While we wrongly attribute violence to mental illness, we simultaneously create conditions that make treatment harder to access.

I’ve worked with people living with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other severe conditions who would never harm another person. They may hear voices or believe strange things, but they still know right from wrong. They still feel empathy. They struggle with illness, not malice.

Most violence isn’t driven by psychiatric symptoms. It’s driven by entitlement, ideology, revenge, or the pursuit of power. Mass shootings are often methodically planned. The perpetrators understand what they’re doing. They believe they’re justified. They are not confused.

We turn to psychiatric explanations because they feel safer. They let us believe that violence can be identified, treated, and prevented through clinical means, but that belief is false—and dangerous.

Most violence is intentional. Most perpetrators are not mentally ill. They know exactly what they’re doing. These are not symptoms. They are choices.

We need to distinguish between the rare cases where illness plays a direct role and the far more common cases where diagnosis is used to soften accountability. That means confronting the belief systems that justify harm. It means refusing to turn deliberate cruelty into a medical issue. And it means holding people morally responsible for the harm they cause.

The uncomfortable truth is this: Some people do terrible things because they want to. Not because they’re sick. And when we rush to diagnose their actions, we trade justice for complexity and accountability for pathology.