Salary: Competitive

[HombreLobo]

Why not let me be the judge of whether the salary offered is competitive or not?

Job searching right now and it's really starting to grate.

AIBU to think that at the very least there should be a salary range or starting point stated?

This makes me so too!

This is one of my pet hates.

Even more so if you dare to call or email said organisation in an attempt to discern the salary range and come up against a virtual brick wall. But hey, prospective employees obviously have nothing better to do with their time than to spend a good couple of hours on an online application for a job which may not meet their salary requirement at all.

I don't understand why, as you say, a range can't be specified ? We understand there's usually some differential due to skills, experience, qualifications etc.

IME, "competitive" is often anything but and seems, these days, to be increasingly a euphemism for "crap" or "as little as we can get away with paying some poor desperate sap".

And while, for most jobs, you'd think you could make a reasonable stab at guessing the salary range applicable, it's such an employer's market now that you really can't depend on guesswork any longer. On quite a number of occasions when I have been able to find out what the range is, I've been genuinely shocked - and not in a good way.

Yes, I particularly like the jobs that have a long list of essential requirements that include a minimum of a masters degree,5 years experience etc. and offer the princely sum of £16k.

The email I got the other day advertising an entry level position at 28k was quite contrary to most other job adverts I see.

Agreed. IMO competitive = below market rate.

Yy - competitive tends to be code for pretty crap.

Very frustrating, and, actually they are wasting their own time too by attracting and then having to evaluate lots of applications from candidates that don't find the pay at all competitive.

I've always interpreted it as 'negotiable'. e.g. they'll match whatever salary another potential employer is offering you. Or it can be negotiated at interview stage.

I have interviewed for two jobs previously only to find out that the salary was way below what I would expect, I don't accept interviews now unless I know what the are prepared to offer, such a waste of time.

Same here. Shocked when looking for jobs recently paying same or less than what I was on 14 years ago...

I disagree, competitive means "we'll pay what you can bring to the position" ie we may well pay a lot more for one person over another, both would be good fits for the position but there isn't a fixed rate - it all depends what you can bring to the job.

Salary- competitive = bend over and brace yourself.

It's usually a euphemism for 'we're too embarrassed to publish it' IME...

Competitive = bollocks
I was offered a job recently that was 25% less than my previous job. They seemed surprised when I said no.

I wasn't surprised given they were a payday loan company. After all if your business is screwing people, why should your staff be any different?

Indeed. I was looking last year. One position wanted extensive experience, team leader or junior management and (the final giggle) fluent German. Their competitive salary was 8.50 an hour, this the south east.

tether

Why don't they just publish a range then Fred. It puts applicants off, me included, so they're just shooting themselves in the foot.

YANBU

I'd agree with competitive=bollocks!

It's not always easy to tell from the job description or title either, some roles will have a huge variation and sometimes the only way to judge what level it's at is through the damn salary. Look at the variation in salaries for roles advertised as "Business Analyst" for example.

It's

Gets my goat too.

I've never understood the secrecy behind salaries during the interview process. IMO it's just as important as being able to do the job.

FFS!

It's probably because current employees are going to have a nosy at what their new colleague is being paid who me? No never

in my experience, the employer thinks they're being all flexible, as some have suggested ("we'll pay well depending on the skills/experiences/qualifications of the applicant") whilst in reality it's what most other posters have said (an excuse to get applicants cheap, and is one of the main functions of why there's so much secrecy about salaries in offices, and allows so many people to be paid vastly different sums of money for the same job, also contributing to the gender wage gap... etc etc).

At least, that's been 100% true in the two jobs I've had myself - I realise that's not a huge sample size!

I hate it when they do this. I don't have particularly high salary expectations but I'm not going to waste hours of my time filling in the application and tailoring my CV to a job which is far more demanding and stressful than my current job but pays peanuts. Why be so evasive? Probably means they know full well that nobody would apply if they were upfront about the salary.

What I can never understand is that in my profession there are very clear salary "bands" which are published annually by the professional bodies. Therefore if you say "competitive" everybody knows what the minimum is, so no one will accept less...

And having been out of the full time job market for several years, with just odd bits of freelance work, I recently applied to a large company where I'd done some freelance stuff so knew I could do the job (and they'd previously have paid expensive fancy agency rates for me, had done so on several occasions).

Not only did they say that their rates were competitive but they wanted me to put down what I was earning... Not much as most of the time I'm a stay at home mum and the last time I got a full time salary was 10 years ago. Needless to say I didn't even get an interview. But dodgy question as it really pulls to the fore things like if you've had a break to have kids.

TheGreatHunt because a range tends to attract inappropriate applicants too, and it makes people offered at the low end of the range unhappy - even if it's more than they would've accepted.

It's not really "shooting themselves in the foot" unless they fail to fill the position, there's lots of people out there, not everyone is only predicated on money - money can be as negotiable as number of days working from home, start/finish times etc. We can't put a range on everything, the sort of employee who is most concerned about just the money isn't necessarily the right one.

If you're not giving competitive salaries and saying you are, then you should soon get found out in your industry. People talk.

I hate this too. Once had an interview where, right at the end, was told the 'competitive' salary was less than I was currently being paid for a more junior role elsewhere.

They then expected me to take a test so I told them I was no longer interested in the job so should save us all from wasting more time and leave. They then spent ages trying to persuade me to take the test and that the job would be worth a pay cut. Bizarre.