I recently interviewed an applicant. At the end of the interview I asked him what he was looking for in terms of salary.
The number he gave was substantially higher than what I had in mind (about 50% higher). I did some research to make sure that my salary expectations for the job and in my specific area were reasonable, and I'm very confident that they are.
Presuming that the candidate would otherwise be a good fit, is it worth to negotiate?
With such a large difference in salary expectations I feel like there isn't any way that we are both going to end up happy, but I'm relatively new to hiring and uncertain about a definitive answer. Could there be more to the story here that I am missing?
Having read all this advice and having had more time to reflect upon the interview, here are some more details that might be relevant:
We advertised a position for a full stack engineer and he emailed us directly with his resume as a front-end HTML/CSS developer. He understood the fact that he was not the candidate we were asking for in our job posting, but we have a variety of needs (including an expert in those skills), so we interviewed him anyway. As a result, there was no stated salary expectations (although his asking salary is at the high end of the posted engineer salary range).
It sounds like at his current job he has a wide variety of different responsibilities. However, he billed himself to us as a front end HTML/CSS person, which is the skill set I was interested in. His other skills aren't of real value to us, and other skills that would make him more valuable to us are things that he doesn't have. As a result, his value to us is largely driven by his experience as an HTML/CSS developer. It could be that he might be worth more to other companies that might give him broader responsibilities.