Leigh Bultema $-$ Group B

You are Leigh Bultema, a product manager at Robust Routers $($RR$)$ who joined the company at its inception and worked successively through roles in marketing, product management, sales, and business development. CEO Craig Hall has kept an eye on your career, personally appointing you to your current position in charge of product management for RR$$s new terabit router.

Despite recent market turbulence, RR is poised for solid future growth. The market for its networking products continues to grow at a healthy clip. The challenge to maintain RR$$s leadership position and dominant market share is attracting and retaining talented employees. In fact, RR$$s CEO has explicitly made recruiting a high priority, and is awarding extra options to managers who meet recruiting goals. Recruiting has dramatically improved since this initiative was announced. As RR evolves from an entrepreneurial company to a large multinational business, the diverse and multi$-$functional skills of a $$general management$$ workforce have become more important. This has led RR to increase its recruiting of talented MBA graduates.

In the last year you have focused virtually all of your efforts on product objectives related to the terabit router and have neglected your recruiting goals. You are motivated to remedy this underperformance during the current recruiting season, and the offer to Joe Tech is a good start. You look forward to bringing Joe on board early this summer, when marketing activity related to the terabit router will begin to accelerate in advance of the fall purchasing season. You made recruiting visits to three other first$-$rate universities this year and identified some attractive candidates. However, you were quite impressed with Joe$$s effort and performance during his internship last summer. You would prefer to hire him over the other possibilities, who seem bright and talented, but did not intern at RR$.$

Joe received an offer from RR back in early fall with a March $1$ deadline. You figured that someone as talented as Joe would explore other possibilities, so it isn$$t particularly surprising that you haven$$t heard from him in recent months. It is now late February, and with the offer deadline looming, Joe has asked to speak with you about the offer. You assume that he wishes to negotiate some aspects of the offer before deciding whether to accept.

The offer letter itself was generated and signed $($on your recommendation, of course$)$ by your boss, the managing director of the Product Management Group. You, as hiring manager, are authorized to negotiate the offer. Recruiting specialists in the firm$$s human resources $($HR$)$ department have briefed you on priorities and parameters that should guide your negotiation with Joe Tech. These can be summed up as follows:

Salary$/$Title: Job titles are important at RR because they are tied not only to salary, but also to stock option grants and year$-$end bonuse