AIBU to expect job adverts to include salary ranges upfront?

[Netcurtainnelly]

Do you agree that the salary range should be posted on every job hiring ad so that applicants' time is not wasted?

Exactly
And it suggests and organisation that doesn't have transparency and fairness as core values

There's a big difference between paying a fair wage - and also one that will help with employee loyalty and retention - and rock bottom insulting 'behave yourself' salaries.

Surely you would approach it like all company costs. Take computers for example - you wouldn't splash out for mega high end gaming rigs for all of your office workers; but neither would you buy 15yo laptops from a dodgy stall on the market selling them for a tenner a pop.

Imagine companies wanting to be taken seriously as honourable, respectable firms... yet routinely employing basically the same tactics (only in reverse) as the rip-off merchants who prey on elderly people by showing them all of the products they offer and refusing to give any prices until they've invested hours of time and energy, before finally hitting them with a staggeringly enormous price - and also pressuring them to agree now without having a chance to compare them with the prices of reputable other suppliers!

Yes, and so we pay genuinely competitive salaries for our industry and region. There's no automatic link between following our industry-standard practice of asking employees for their salary requirements and paying insulting rock bottom wages. I wouldn't stay in my own job of I was being paid insulting rock bottom wages

Yeah, that would be awful.

But it's not analogous to me advertising for a position in my team that could be filled by someone I might want to pay £50k and someone we'd stretch to maybe £85k for. I'm not standing over them with a contract. We're having a professional conversation.

I interviewed someone yesterday who I am considering offering a job to. I asked about her salary expectations. She told me her current salary (which she, of course, could be lying about). She's moving from a position which isn't directly comparable to the one I'm hiring for but, even so, if we hire her, she'll start on an increased salary to what she said. She's free to negotiate and doesn't have to take the job. She's not some helpless participant in the process.

You must recognise the difference in men and women in these situations and how women will no doubt be disproportionately worse off. How on earth can you ensure fairness in a process like that. I also find it very odd that you’d have a £30,000 differential, surely you firstly quantify the value of the job itself, maybe it’s different in a profiteering industry.

I do recognise the inherent gender inequalities. I also recognise the competitive disadvantage for our company in our industry if we began unilaterally revealing our salary structures. If it was a statutory requirement, then things would be different but, as it isn't, we have to deal with what we have.

The value of this job is dependent on the person who does it. We wouldn't be paying someone £50k and expecting them to do the job to the same standard as someone coming in at £80k. Someone on £50k would require more support and deliver less value.

Maybe it is different in a profiteering industry. I wouldn't know.

@MasterBeth I find it very hard to believe you’re not working in an industry that’s focussed on profit based on what you’ve disclosed about your employer.

I agree. Also: the hours too.

My DH has been quite bored in his job for a few years, and he is not too fond of the place half the time and is only staying because he needs the job. (He is 60-ish.) It's 30 hours a week, (3 ten hour shifts,) and it's a 30 hour a week contract. (Guaranteed hours.) He has been there since the late noughties, and is one of very few (of 35-ish employees) to have a contract that has a decent amount of hours.

The most amount of hours anyone else has is 16 (guaranteed.) And only about 7 or 8 of them have that. (Out of the hourly paid staff.) Most only have 8 to 10 hours a week guaranteed. The manager and 2 supervisors have 32 hour weeks every week. But that's it. He was one of the last to have decent hours on his contract, on consecutive days. (Sun, Mon, Tue one week, then Tue, Wed, Thu the next, and it alternates.)

He has applied for about 10 jobs in the last 7 years that just say (eg) Warehouse Assistant or checkout operator or something similar, and there is no sign of the salary - or the hours. He applies, and it turns out to be minimum pay, and also only 10 to 14 hours, (guaranteed,) and is to be worked over 3 or 4 days, and the days would vary from week to week. BUT there will be up to 10 hours a week extra some weeks (overtime!) FFS how are you meant to plan anything? And if you do only get 10 to 14 hours, how the fuck are you supposed to live on that?!

Needless to say, he gave up on other jobs some 2-3 years ago, and is going to stick this one til he retires. It's 30 hours a week guaranteed, and is £15 an hour. It's quite easy too, and he knows the job well, and gets on well with his colleagues. He just doesn't like the company much!

That's not what "profiteering" means.

So that's why adverts give a band and say "depending on skills and experience" ... That's how I have always recruited - it's transparent but allows flexibility

I clearly wouldn’t be good enough for your Very Important Industry

Where the fuck did that come from?

It's not an important industry and I have made no suggestion that it is. It's categorically not brain surgery or rocket science or curing cancer.

No need to go around throwing shade just because you don't know what profiteering means.

Jeez Louise calm the heck down, it was a self deprecating joke as I clearly thought it meant profit driven which I’m sure you were able to infer from my post. If you wonder why your posts have come across a certain way read the room. Nobody here thinks your industry is above fairness and transparency, you yourself admitted it negatively impacts women, and yet here you are trying to defend indirect sexism in the name of a profit driven ( ) “competitive industry”.

Equally, you could’ve got all this way through and your candidate could’ve said she was on £100k, and you’d have wasted everyone’s time, which would be avoided if you were simply transparent about your budget.

Surely you should know what job you’re actually recruiting for before starting the process?

It sounds really disorganised to be honest to be vaguely interviewing for candidates to come in at very different levels, why don’t you define the role more accurately and recruit for the level of experience you actually need?

Well, we're looking for good people and we'll shape the job around them. We don't know exactly what the role will be in six months time because part of the job is about discovering and growing new opportunities.

And yet every serious* candidate who's applied fits inside our salary parameters, so maybe, within the industry and the job spec, there's a pretty clear understanding of what we're looking for.

(*I say serious because there have been plenty of candidates who have applied with only a tangential connection to what we've asked for, so there are lots of people out there applying for jobs they aren't suited for anyway...)

Also, terrible for diversity and equity on gender pay gap.

I'm not saying that you're scammers, like the firms preying on elderly people are. Then again, it may just be that their targeted customers are phenomenally rich, specifically want that company and don't care about paying an inflated cost.

However, the point still stands about opacity and potentially wasting people's time (including your own). You tell us that she'll start on more money than she's currently on, but a number of people on here have said that they've been offered considerably less than they're already earning. How can candidates possibly know that your firm wouldn't be the same?

There's nothing stopping you from saying '£50K min or more for an outstanding candidate', which is still annoying; but at least that gives people an idea or whether or not it might be worth their time applying. Even then, though, their definition of 'outstanding' may be very different from yours - just like the companies mentioned above for whom 'competitive' means NMW or a few pence over.

But equally, how do you know how many more serious and amazing candidates would have applied if you'd given them an idea of what you're willing to pay, but don't bother as they find your cageyness off-putting?

There's usually a reason why companies deliberately don't mention some very basic information - and it tends not to suggest positivity. Just like an estate agent won't mention upfront the sewage works next to the house that people have asked to view, and companies selling smart TVs won't stress the common apps that don't work on it; similarly many people will assume that a firm that's unwilling to state what salary they are offering for an advertised role is probably not going to be paying particularly well.

I’m grateful I’ve always worked for organisations and companies with banded pay which is available on their website. I don’t apply for anything without a salary listed, and I’d assume any company that didn’t were involved in practices that probably disadvantaged women and weren’t interested in closing their male/female wage gap.

To be honest, that would sound like a massive red flag to me. I'm not saying that your company is like this at all; but many companies that don't really seem to much know what actual jobs they want people for, nor what salaries they'll be offering, will come across as chaotic and unstable at best, or scammy or exploitative at worst.

Not unreasonable, but I find it's rare in private sector. It's quite normal to have 20-30k disparity between people in the same role, sometimes for market reasons rather than experience, with absolutely no scope to progress to it without leaving (and lying about current salary). Makes it very difficult to know your worth too. Likewise, when you're more experienced it makes it impossible to know if something is with bothering with. The ambiguity just keeps wages low 🫠

In my opinion you should sit in a band and ideally progress through it. If am external candidate has buckets of experience then fine, offer or negotiate to the top of it. If you can justify it then its fine. Public sector are/were good at this (though I think most civil servants expect to start at the bottom with no progression through the band these days)

I also hate people I used to work with posting jobs on LinkedIn and not stating salaries! I’m disappointed in them!