Hover a line for its translation; hover a word for its meaning. Tap 🔊 to hear it.
Generate a brand-new dialog on any topic, using this lesson's 0 vocab words — plus any words you add below.
Sign in to generate dialogues. It needs a pass — the first ten lessons of every course are free either way.
Headhunters, salaries and the move to Barcelona
The call in this lesson is a common one for young professionals in Spain who have made a visible success of something: a recruiter from a larger firm, usually based in Madrid or Barcelona, the country's two economic centers, offering more money, a team and a title. Spanish salary conversations have conventions worth knowing. Pay is quoted as an annual gross figure, so many euros brutos al año, sometimes paid in twelve installments and sometimes in fourteen, as lesson 106 explained. What arrives in your account each month is the net figure, after income tax and social security contributions, and a headhunter will often translate one into the other, as here. Many offers add a variable, a performance bonus, and sometimes benefits such as health insurance or meal vouchers. Fifty-five thousand gross is a good salary in Spain, well above the national average, which is part of why the offer is tentador. The move itself has a cost the headhunter does not dwell on. Barcelona, like Madrid, has seen housing costs rise steeply, and a higher salary can disappear into rent. Catalonia also has its own language, Catalan, which is co-official, widely used in professional life and in schools, as lesson 79 explained, so a move there is a cultural change as well as a geographic one. And there is loyalty. In smaller Spanish firms, where people work closely and know each other's families, leaving for a competitor, especially one that recently tried to buy your company, is felt personally. Discretion during the process, as the headhunter requests, is standard; so is telling your current employer before any public announcement, which is the dilemma the next lessons take up.