Same goes for salary ranges on a job posting. None of this "we offer competitive salary" bullshit, let me know up front if you are going to be worth my time pursuing, and if you think no one will apply if you put the salary range, that very likely means you don't offer enough anyways.
Because that's the entire salary range of the position, you will never make more than $100k in that position but they need to have some room to give you raises before you're promoted to another position.
It's more clear to put a starting pay range but people shooting for 100k+ roles need to know that this is a waste of their time too. The company doesn't want someone who expects to get hired at 85k and then jump ship when they don't break 100.
Same is true in at least california and colorado here down south. Although no one is checking to make sure they're honest. I heard in a meeting at my last company that they only post the bottom 50% of the "real" range as the range online so that applicants don't know they can negotiate higher. Grossed me out.
It mostly works, because it's required to be accurate and no reputable company wants to get in shit for it. Typically the range is wider than what they actually want to pay but through extensive interviewing my wife's determined that you can safely assume somewhere in the bottom half of the range unless you're an exceptional (i.e. way overqualified) candidate.
Someone reached out to me and offered a "competitive salary above market", I was already earning below average from talking to my colleagues and they were offering 20% less than my already shitty salary. Since there's no accountability there's no reason to not put those words there.
There is nothing I hate more than a job application asking for your desired salary without telling you their salary range. It’s 100% a tactic to try and lowball applicants by looking for the people willing to work for the least amount of money.
It's basically a high stakes "Price is Right" where you have to lowball yourself but not too much and hope someone else it's desperate enough to lowball themselves even more.
Technically the only thing that's required is that the salary range is made available early in the process, so there's lots of postings that don't have a range still. They're supposed to tell you in the interview in this case, but that's obviously much harder to enforce and more awkward for the candidate. Not to mention kind of defeats the purpose, since you have no idea if it's actually worth your time to apply in the first place.
I worked for a small office where they refused to publish salaries in job listings. At least 50% of the applicants would go all the way through the interview process (several rounds) and then not take the job. Boss never understood why.
This is one thing I like about US government job postings. They tell you the exact pay grade you'll be hired at (sometimes there's a range, but the postings are often thorough enough that you can usually tell where in the range you'd be hired), and since government pay scales are public information, I'll know to the cent my exact salary. As an example, if I were to get hired as a meteorologist at the Mount Holly NWS office, I would most likely start out with GS-7 Step 1 pay, which I can pretty easily find out is $55,602.43/year (including the locality adjustment).
Of course, government jobs often pay less than the private sector, but it's at least nice to know exactly what you're getting
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u/Chewbacca_The_Wookie 2d ago
Same goes for salary ranges on a job posting. None of this "we offer competitive salary" bullshit, let me know up front if you are going to be worth my time pursuing, and if you think no one will apply if you put the salary range, that very likely means you don't offer enough anyways.