[teeray]

“I’d love to work for you because the work is super interesting, and the team sounds great. However, I’m having difficulty finding my way to accepting your offer because doing so would cause significant hardship from taking such a drastic pay cut. I currently have another offer from a company for $99k, but I feel that I could offer greater impact at your organization. Is there anything we could do to make this decision easier for me?”

The collaborative approach is usually the best one to negotiation. People want to help and solve problems, and that includes the recruiter. This hits all the points you made while giving them a solution to the “problem” you pose on a silver platter.

[slyzmud]

Honestly, it was a surprise to me when the recruiter told me the number in the meeting. My first thought was "this is a joke", so it was a little hard being calm.

I think they saw an average of salaries in Glassdoor. The problem is that in Argentina we have 60% inflation annually so information there gets old pretty quickly. Salaries grow 2x every 2 or 3 years. Maybe explaining that helps. I would like to know where they got their estimation for the salary.