I was presented with a noncompetition agreement after 1 week employment, is it inappropriate to negotiate a higher salary guarantee​ before I sign it?

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This is how I would handle your situation.

Step one - Immediately start putting out resumes. Line up a few interviews. Your new employer is not acting in good faith. That’s reason enough to start looking.

Step two - Buy time and simultaneously send a message. Tell them you need time to go over the document and to get legal advice. This should buy you maybe a week and send the message that you aren’t to be messed with. Once an employee mentions the word “lawyer,” most employers cut back quick on the bullying.

There is a good chance that this will cause them to drop the requirement entirely. If they do, you can stop now. You don’t have the leverage to negotiate a higher salary, and whatever they’d give you won’t really be worth the trouble. If they double down then you can move on to step three.

Step three - Your objective here is to not sign the agreement. You do not have leverage to ask for a salary increase. But because they did not act in good faith, you can earn a great deal of leverage by obtaining a job offer or two in the meantime. You said in step two that you needed to get legal advice, but really you are going through an interview process.

Step four - You are playing a game of chicken with your employer. They will keep hammering you on the non-compete agreement and it will become increasingly clear to them that you do not intend on signing it. Your trump card here is the fact that you started looking for a job immediately after they started playing dirty tricks.

They’re probably not going to fire you unless you give them another reason to. So keep your work performance impeccable while you go through the process of lining up another offer. Keep a really good poker face and if you have to, level with the reason why you’re not signing the agreement. You were not made aware that a non-compete was require to take this position and would not have taken it if it were.

This will get them to either fire you or drop the requirement. What they do will depend on how good of an employee you’ve been. They don’t want to look for another candidate when they already have a perfectly suitable one.

Step five - You’ve gotten another offer from another employer. Take the offer and go to your current employer and tell them that their foisting of a non-compete on you after you’ve already started working for them made you nervous, so you started looking for another job. Here is their chance to earn your loyalty. Offer them two salaries, a higher one for staying at the job and signing the non-compete, and a lower one for staying at the job and not signing the non-compete.

Prefer staying at the company rather than jumping ship. You’re playing a gentleman’s game here and it’ll be understood that you aren’t really looking to jump, you’re just playing the game. If they give you a reasonable salary bump then go ahead and stick around. You’ll get way more respect as someone who played hardball with HR and got the better of them.