I was intrigued last week when I received the results of a survey from the giant Menlo Park-based staffing agency Robert Half, saying that more than three quarters of hiring managers think it’s appropriate for job candidates to ask about compensation and benefits in the initial phone screening or first two job interviews. I’ve written at least three stories saying it’s best for job seekers to put off salary negotiations until an offer is on the table. Was I wrong?

Paul McDonald, a senior executive director at Robert Half, says, “In this market, with 1% or 2% unemployment for some jobs, employers want to get to this business quickly. They want to see if there’s a good fit and they’re OK with the candidate bringing up the salary in order to be efficient with time.” Conversely, he says, applicants should be ready to answer questions about salary early in the process. “We believe honesty is the best policy,” he says.” If someone asks what has been your salary in the past three positions, we coach the applicant to be prepared for that.” The firm surveyed 300 hiring managers by phone in December 2013.

Has something changed in salary negotiation strategy since I first wrote about the topic two years ago? To answer that question I turned to three of my best career coach sources and to Heidi Ellingson, senior director of employment services at Middleton, WI-based Spectrum Brands, a diversified consumer products company with 13,500 employees worldwide, which makes everything from Rayovac batteries to George Foreman grills. She doesn’t recommend that candidates bring up the subject but instead she has her own staff raise salary in the very first phone screening. “We want to make sure we’re in the right ballpark,” she says. Frequently candidates don’t want to reveal either their salary or what they hope to earn, in which case Ellison’s team tries at least to get a range. “We don’t want to waste people’s time if we’re $20,000 apart,” she says.

Have I been giving my readers bad advice? In a word, no. The job of staffing firms like Robert Half is to screen candidates for employers so they can present the most viable candidates, and hiring managers have an incentive to get candidates to name a number early in the process. But from the candidate’s perspective, especially if you are negotiating for a managerial or executive position, it’s best to avoid saying anything specific about salary until a job offer is on the table.

“It’s like saying on a first date, ‘how many kids do you want,’” says Roy Cohen, a longtime coach and author of The Wall Street Professional’s Survival Guide. Sarah Stamboulie, a coach who previously worked in human resources at Cantor Fitzgerald, Morgan Stanley and Nortel Networks, agrees. “You don’t want to be negotiating salary until they’re at their maximum love—their maximum enthusiasm for you,” she says. Once a prospective employer has convinced themself and their colleagues that you are their first choice, they are much more likely to bump up your package in order to get you.

Longtime coach Ellis Chase, author of The Fun Forever Job: Career Strategies that Work, agrees with Cohen and Stamboulie and lays out four reasons naming a salary is a bad idea: 1) If you come in very low, the potential employer won’t take you seriously, 2) If you come in low the employer will think they can pay you less than they had planned to offer, 3) You price yourself out of the running, and 4) Even if you fall in the right range, you may not realize that the job comes with more responsibilities than you had thought and now you’ve ruined your negotiating stance.

There are a couple of exceptions however. Stamboulie has worked with young up-and-comers at top consulting firms who have gotten multiple offers from employers who might not know the candidates want to make at least, say, $150,000. The fact that they don’t need to accept any of the offers puts them in a strong position, especially if they know they want to shoot high.

The other reason would be if you’re a superstar, you’re happy where you are and you’d only leave for a certain number. A third reason could be if you’re talking to a small startup where it’s tough to glean ahead of time what the salary range would be. Then you might want to name what Stamboulie calls an “anchor number” that will help the firm know what you think you’re worth.

What if the hiring manager or decision maker asks you what you make? That’s a tougher question. Chase says you should rarely volunteer a number and instead counter with a line like, “I’m very interested in this position but I would hate for a dollar figure to eliminate me from consideration because if there’s a fit, I’m sure we’ll be able to work it out.” If that doesn’t work, you could try, “Could you give me an idea of your range?” The goal, as I’ve written before, is to wait for the offer and then to get the decision-maker to be the first to name a number. If the hiring manager becomes visibly annoyed, says Chase, then you have to relent, but it’s always better to give a range, rather than a precise figure.

Cohen agrees. “A lot of hedge funds will bring it up. They’ll say what are you earning and what are you looking for. If you don’t give them some sort of benchmark you’ll look like you’re trying to tap dance around it.”

One of Cohen’s Wall Street trader clients can’t hold himself back. “He won’t do his homework,” says Cohen. “He’ll go into an interview and say, ‘I want to know what this job pays, I want to know the base, I want to know the formula, I want to know what cash I’ll get at the end of the year.’” According to Cohen, this candidate has blown three or four opportunities in the first interview. “When the market was stronger, they would tolerate this sort of thing,” he says. “But now he’s shooting himself in the foot.”

The folks at Robert Half may be right about the preferences of recruiters and HR managers, but it’s always best to try to bypass those gate keepers and go straight to the person who will make the ultimate decision about whether you get the job.

This article was written by Susan Adams from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.

Who’s the hottest hire in Silicon Valley today? No, it’s not the data scientist, mobile app engineer, or digital marketer; it’s a user experience designer. Today, if your enterprise app isn’t beautiful, simple, elegant, and easy-to-use from day one, your company has little hope of becoming a billion-dollar business. Design is everything.

Data from jobs website Glassdoor showed that, in early May, 2,260 companies nationally were hoping to hire user experience (UX) designers.That compares to 975 companies trying to hire big data engineers, another “hot” hire. Jobs for user-experience designers are expected to grow 22% over the next 10 years; in the San Francisco Bay Area, epicenter of the current tech boom, Glassdoor reports the average salary for a senior UX designer at about $114,000, as of last month. The head of one New York-based startup recently told me he’s now paying UX designers two times what he pays other types of equally experienced designers, compared with just 30% more a few years ago. This CEO is actively recruiting UX gurus in Europe — despite the visa costs — because of what he sees as a pronounced shortage in the U.S.

Having been an entrepreneur and investor in enterprise software companies for 20 years, I’ve seen a huge shift in the last few years toward creating a stellar user experience. Remember when software companies like Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP sold massive, costly, complex applications that took months to learn? IT administrators spent several months installing and learning how to use the new software. Then, employees sat through training courses and muddled through complicated screens to figure out their new “productivity tools.” Ironically, the applications were so poorly designed that they hampered productivity; many end-users were so confused, they avoided using the apps all together.

Next-gen SaaS companies like Salesforce.com made rolling out software faster and cheaper, but the user experience is still pretty dreadful. Well, no one will put up with that now. IT administrators—and employees accustomed to using beautifully designed products like Apple’s iPhone–want to instantly “turn on” Web and mobile apps so employees can grasp new enterprise tools within minutes, with no formal training. In fact, some of the best designed applications are consumed by the employees directly with no training or involvement from IT whatsoever.

A few years ago, SaaS companies such as Box, Dropbox, Atlassian,and Zendesk led the charge to create elegant and easy-to-use enterprise apps. Today many enterprise startups like Captora, Any.do and SumAll (Battery Ventures is an investor in SumAll) are also baking design into their DNA. In each case, a UX designer was one of the first five hires, and product design was core to the company’s product strategy. This is in stark contrast to traditional enterprise software companies like Oracle, SAP and Salesforce, where design was an afterthought.

Let’s look at some examples to see how far we have come.

Box vs. Sharepoint 

Zendesk vs. Remedy

So, as an enterprise software entrepreneur, what does a design-driven world mean to your company at a practical level?

• First, make sure an experienced designer is one of your first five hires. This will ensure design is prioritized early in your company’s culture.
• Second, aim to hire one designer for every three to five engineers. This ratio may sound high, but remember that design is a competitive advantage over time. Better product design typically yields higher product engagement, quicker sales cycles and higher customer lifetime value.
• Third, consider making UX a VP-level role. It would not surprise me to see more enterprise companies elevate the design function to a senior status. One recent example of this is Trifacta, where two of the company’s senior executives have “Experience” in their title – Jeff Heer, cofounder and chief experience officer, and Tutti Taygerly, VP of user experience. Once designers see your company has a VP-level design role reporting directly to the CEO, they’ll be more likely to accept job offers, as they know their contributions will be valued.

Of course, large enterprise software companies aren’t about to give up on the design race without a fight, and companies such as IBM have publicly announced initiatives to hire thousands of UX designers. But startups have an edge in the “race to simplicity” because it’s far easier to create an elegant product from scratch than it is to fix a clunky and complex one.You can put lipstick on a pig (digitally), but it’s still a pig.

This article was written by Roger Lee in the My Say Column by Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.  Photo Credit ChrisLaBrooy. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.