I wonder how many hours recruitment collectively wastes every year because somebody decided to write “competitive salary” on a job advert.
Candidate applies. Someone reviews the CV. There’s a call and maybe an interview. Eventually someone mentions money. They need £70k, the budget is £55k and that’s that. Thanks very much, all the best.
It’s a pretty ridiculous process when you think about it.
Salary transparency gets talked about a lot, usually around fairness, equal pay and whether people should know what their colleagues earn. All important conversations in their own right. There’s another, much more practical argument for talking about pay upfront. It saves everyone time.
The truth, though, is that true pay transparency can be uncomfortable.
You might have somebody who’s been with the business for five years earning £55k, while the current market says you’ll need to pay £65k to attract somebody with similar experience today. Put £65k on the advert and you’ve potentially created another conversation internally before you’ve even hired anyone. For a whole host of reasons you might not end up making the hire, so you’ve disclosed the salary discrepancy and you haven’t even made the hire.
I get why employers are wary of that. I just don’t think hiding the salary is a particularly good solution.
Because the £65k hasn’t disappeared. If that’s what you need to pay to hire the person you want, you’re probably going to end up paying it anyway. You’ve just made sure your existing employees don’t find out about it through the job advert, while making the hiring process less transparent for everybody coming into it. Staying on track with market salaries and having a knowledge of whats happen externally as well as internally is key, and undoubtedly helps to support a healthy, rewarding and cohesive working culture.
We’ll happily tell someone where they need to work, how many days they need to be in the office, what experience they need, which technologies they need to know and probably give them 15 bullet points detailing everything we expect them to do. But the bit explaining what we’re prepared to pay them for doing all of that?
Competitive. Helpful.
Of course, sometimes there genuinely is flexibility. You might pay £55k for somebody with three years’ experience and £70k for somebody who brings considerably more. That’s completely reasonable, but that’s also exactly what salary ranges are for.
£55k–£70k depending on experience. Up to £70k. Circa £60k with flexibility for the right person. None of those lock an employer into paying a particular salary. They simply give somebody enough information to decide whether a conversation is worth having.
Because despite what we sometimes pretend, salary matters. Hirefinity keeps a note of each candidate’s primary motivation for finding a new job and, unsurprisingly, pay ranks high. 40% tell us pay is their primary motivation for looking for something new.
Finding that number out after they’ve heavily curated their CV, completed all the application fields, taken time out of their working day and potentially attended an interview, benefits absolutely nobody.
There’s also a recruitment argument for transparency that I think gets overlooked: you actually want some people not to apply.
If your budget is £55k and somebody needs £80k, them deciding not to apply isn’t a failure of your advert. It’s the advert doing its job. The aim surely isn’t to generate the largest possible pile of CVs; it’s to generate interest from people who could realistically take the job.
There is, of course, some nuance here. Not everyone wants or expects more money in their next role. Someone might happily take less if the job speaks to their other motivations. Equally, a company might genuinely have the flexibility to pay across a 30–40% range depending on who they find.
That’s great. A broader range of applicants should be expected in that case. Just make it clear.
There’s enough unavoidable wastage in recruitment already. People change their minds, jobs change, interviews don’t work out, counteroffers happen and candidates accept other jobs. We don’t need to manufacture more of it by keeping one of the most important pieces of information secret.
And if the salary is genuinely competitive?
Put the number on the advert and prove it.