I’m getting frustrated by these. A couple of jobs recently I spent time on applying for invited me for interview, at which point I asked about salary, to be told it was a lot less than I expected. No deal.

I now have two more I’m wanting to apply to.
One a good online stalk hunt produced a name and number, who point blank refused to talk about job or salary details until I have spent a couple of hours effort applying and get through round 1.
Job two my stalking skillz let me down, so again faced with potentially couple of hours effort to simply find out the salary offer.

Both are bigger /international organisations. Is this par for the course? Any idea…

Yes its BS – I always ask people what there salary expectations are up front. That way you avoid potentially wasting each others time. Banks, oddly, are very bad at this

If the salary is not advertised or is advertised as “market rate” I don’t even go any further- usually their idea of “market rate” is at least 10-20% below the actual market rate for the job

Why ask for their expectations though, wouldn’t it be easier to advertise the salary range with the position ?

Probably causes issues for us, but it’s all based on the job grade and the salary band for that can be up to 20k from top to bottom of the grade

I’d imagine the main reason is that they do not wish the current employees to know what they are offering.
In the past we have had agents quote figures that were fantasy and upsetting the current employees

Because salaries vary … plus its always good to see how people handle the question?

I did once have a stand off with someone who was trying to hire me in the 90s and he asked me what I wanted to be paid. I refused to show my hand and simply asked him what he was prepared to pay me (I was being poached, so held the cards!) – we had a complete stand off which was spooky at the time but fun and a good topic over a shared beer after I joined!

We advertise a salary range and literally everyone gets offered the minimum. No doubt someone in hr thinks this is a terrific wheeze but we advertised for a project manager and the winning candidate walked away when she found this out. And so did the second candidate. So we ended up hiring the one person who’d do it for the too-low minimum rate, and he was a total donkey.

If you have to ask….they probably can’t afford you 😉

Ok not to have it in advert, imho, but should be possible to get the broad info as part of an informal pre-application chat.

I’d imagine the main reason is that they do not wish the current employees to know what they are offering.

Could well be, still bloody annoying though.

Having been made redundant from a job that was regulalry advertised without a sallary, I’d feel pretty millitant if I was back in that position when it came to pay reviews!

Dutch auction now-a-days! He/she who is most malleable and cheapest wins.

I’ve been stalked a few times on LinkedIn recently, wanting to have a ‘chat’ about vacancies and they’re really coy about the salary, unlike above though I’ve been fairly surprised if they’ve actually opened up about it.

My feeling is that after nearly 10 years of low growth and low confidence salaries haven’t moved much, but we’re actually in a period of record employment and low unemployment – maybe employers are having to offer more than current salaries to get the right people but they dont want to have to pay their current guys more?

maybe employers are having to offer more than current salaries to get the right people but they dont want to have to pay their current guys more?

I’ve worked at a couple of those places. Once as one of the current guys, twice as the newer recruit on more money than the current guys. Part of the problem is that to get the current guys onto an equal footing would break the annual percentage increase allowed by the powers that be.
The longer you stay at any given company, the more likely your salary will fall behind what is needed to attract new recruits

My feeling always was that if they don’t advertise the salary its because its poor. However I did work for one outfit that didn’t advertise salaries and benefits when they were well above the industry norm. they complained they didn’t get good applicants for the jobs. I tried to get them to include terms and conditions in the adverts and to express it in such a way as to show how good they were. they wouldn’t and could give me no reason

so my experience is either its low salary or numpty bosses or both

Don’t forget that plenty of companies use interviews mainly as a means of gaining market intelligence on their competitors. No need to talk salaries as they have no intention of giving anyone a job.

Ditto the other way round, some people are just using the process to get a pay rise themselves so it works both ways. Messy business, business!!!

If you have to ask….they probably can’t afford you

I’m feeling it’s this.
Trying to jump from third sector back into business – so acres of experience and responsibility, no formal bits of paper or job title to say so as little charities do not do these things.

Some job sites have a salary but it’s marked as hidden, you can move the salary scale around and work out the range.

Depends what job you are applying for I suppose but if I ever applied for a job I used to put a cover note in that i wouldn’t consider anything under a certain amount . That saves time wasted on both sides . I also avoided any job that said applicant must have a good sense of humor because that seemed to mean would work for peanuts . I worked as a chef though so there were usually more jobs than good chefs so was usually negotiating from a position of power .

I tend to find that those who mention a figure first lose. In the past I have gone through the interview process and waited to be offered the job. At which point I find out what they are offering. As they have said they want you it puts you in a better negotiating position. If the offer is way off I explain this and walk. Sometimes it has resulted in a big increase in offer (depends how much they wanted you). If the offer is in the ball park you can usually squeeze a bit more out of them. But it is a pain putting in all the hard ground work for a salary that is half what you wanted. If you ask straight out what the deal is a) you look interested in the money, not the job b) they tell you the lowest offer, if they tell you at all.

. If you ask straight out what the deal is a) you look interested in the money, not the job

Of course I’m interested in the money, I don’t work as a hobby.

Jambo+1 when I was looking I’d phone up and ask if nothing was declared. Plenty I didn’t apply for after this.

Sometimes though, the range is vast. In complex skilled or knowledge based
jobs being able to walk in and start is years ahead of having transferable skills.

This applies to every job I’ve applied for since leaving the NHS back in the 20th century. Though current salary or expectations is something that often crops up when speaking with recruiters.

It is common to offer new people higher salaries for the ‘same’ job than the current incumbents get. This works in a few ways. 1. the current folks must be happy with what they get otherwise they’d have moved on. 2. it makes salary disparity in the department more apparent and helps in ‘market rate’ discussions with HR. 3. You have to pay the going rate for the best candidates. If you don’t have enough flexibility the candidates don’t take the job and you’re back into 3 months of expensive recruitment + lost opportunity costs. That kind of headache is worth something to avoid.

With few exceptions, the ‘package’ is negotiable. It might not be salary, or job title where there’s much room. But add in allowances, pension contributions, health cover, time off, flex-time, study leave etc and know what you need and want and there’s usually a deal to be made that everyone will like. Use a principled approach rather than get wedded to a particular item unless it really is a ‘deal breaker’.

@tjagain

so my experience is either its low salary or numpty bosses or both

depends on the industry perhaps? Aside from some graduate posts jobs I’ve been involved in recruiting for never show salary or package figures aside from ‘salary + benefits’.

The issue is that the two jobs I called and asked about were about 50? down on my current salary, which is OK but not brilliant.
Both the jobs I am looking at want years of experience, some qualifications and someone to take significant responsibility – just like the two that I declined to apply to.
It just puts you in a position of either not applying, having to call and ask straight out about money, or potentially waste lots of my and thier time.

There is nothing wrong with asking/or being told about salary expectations.. this isn’t the 70’s, (whilst that scenario may occur in the future when everyone’s out of work)

Plenty of movement in my world, plenty of contact about position becoming available in Europe, all happy to talk salary expectations and day rate too. I’ll agree with the “market rate” crap, but that can range by 00’s per day as the scale is quite large already.

But, sorry, if you don’t apply, you’ll never know.

Personally I would never apply for a job where they wouldn’t tell me the salary – and I would make sure the recruiter knew that so if I was in your position Matt and they refused to tell you then during that phonecall I would be telling them why I wasn’t going to go forward with the application

Yep not having the salary on the job description is annoying. Unless it’s a job I’m REALLY interested in I won’t bother with it. Waste of my time and their time if it doesn’t offer me the requisite salary. Better to know first.

Saying that our company advertise jobs internally, without the salary. I raised this with our “recruitment specialist”, pointed out it was stupid and the fact that if you went online you could find the job offered externally with salary expectations. She didn’t get back to my last email on the subject and we still don’t publish salary expectations for internal vacancies 🙄

I wouldn’t enter into any proper negotiations for anything unless I knew I was in the correct ballpark, be it cars, house, jobs whatever. So as job specs are written to sound amazing, salary is often a good way to see the various levels as the words were written to impress, and normally by someone with no functional knowledge of the job.

I treat it just the same as when negotiating contracts – if I think people are pricing what they can get away with and do not actually know their maximum or what they really want to spend, then it’s unlikely to work out well.

People sometimes see it as showing your hand early, but it should be thought of as more as showing you are able to play in the same game. If an applicant applies purely because of a stated salary, and they are not able to do the job – the interview process should sort that out. If they don’t think it will, the recruitment team should spend a bit more time looking at their own salary expectations…

Someone touched on it above. But salary isn’t the only consideration. I get 31 days holiday, private healthcare, my eployer adds double my pension contribution up to 6% (so 18% in total salary sacrifice).

If you offer 23 days holiday I’d want more than the equivalent pay increase, in fact I probably wouldn’t take the job unless there was something like flexitime involved or a vast increase in salary.

People value different things and it is hard to list all benefits.

Of course a lot of these comments about what you would or wouldn’t do are based on your existing position. If you NEED a job, youhave to jump through hoops and cannot make demands.

I had an interview once & they said at the end of the interview that they were interested in recruiting me etc. etc. and here’ the package I’d expect to get….the salary was about £3k down on what they had originally told me it would be, so I queried it and the bloke looked like I’d just slapped him across the face.
Bearing in mind this wasn’t long out of uni, so £3k was well over a 10% difference between expected & actual & the area I would have been moving to was much more expensive in terms of living costs.

They wouldn’t budge at all, so I ended up turning it down. It’s funny how £multi-million International companies who are telling you moments before that they sell this many thousand products/year at an average price of Y and profits are booming blah blah struggle to find £3k when pushed……

I’ve had approaches form rectruitment agents, where they can specify the day rate, but can’t give me a written job spec / person profile.
I was also interviewing last week and the recruitment agent rang me to ask which role he’d put the candidate in for 😆 amazingly, that candidate was the best we’d seen by a country mile and will progress to the next stage.

The entire recruitment process is broken ime. Ridiculous miss match between skills required for job, skills advertised for and salary offered.

TheBrick – Member

The entire recruitment process is broken ime. Ridiculous miss match between skills required for job, skills advertised for and salary offered.

I wouldn’t disagree, it’s a market like any other buyers (employers) and sellers (employees) and it’s in a terrible state of flux.

On one hand you’ve got nervous sellers, nearly 10 years since Northern Rock fell but redundancies are far from a memory and few people believe we’ve really recovered from it and of course the great unknown of the ‘B Word’. It takes a very unhappy employee or a great offer to make someone jump-ship given you’ve got to be in a job for 2 years these days just to pass the point when you can pretty much be sacked on the spot without reason.

On the other, we’ve got a level of employment and unemployment that’s technically better than in 2006/7 – at that time you had to offer decent money and a decent ‘package’ to entice people – remember final salary pensions? But we also still have a huge level of under employment, Professionals and Experienced Experts taking calls in call centres, stacking shelves and flipping burgers rather than sign-on.

So as an Employer looking for a new skilled member of staff, what do you do? Offer 80% of usual rate and hope to find that perfect person who’s unemployed or underemployed or offer 120% to entice someone to jump-ship? With that in mind, you can kind of see why they won’t quote a salary – cake and eat it, if you can get the former great, but if you can only get the latter you still can.

A lot of the adverts I see with no salary I also recognise as standard cut and paste advert, same list of skills, time and time again, for different non specific places. I don’t believe the job even exists, especially when I’ve seen adverts that are at copy of a job I know was long gone. Description of the company is usually vague and generic.

Had one which explicitly stated they will not disclose salary until an offer is made. Yeah right.

I can understand why they do it, but it is very frustrating.

It’s not just salaries either, so many job adverts forget that recruiting is a two-way process. They give you a paragraph of preamble about how wonderful they think they are, a big long list of what they want, and absolutely no indication of what they’re offering at all.

We don’t advertise salary and by the end of the year my team will have hired 500 people, with the whole resourcing function bringing 1600 people into the business this year. That’s 1600 experienced white collar, skilled people, in a market with significant skills shortages. Not bad for a broken recruitment process.

As to why we don’t advertise salaries, it’s politics really, partly to do with existing staff salaries (and the same job titles meaning different things in different parts of the business), partly because the range can and does change quickly depending on what the market tells us when we’re looking.

Even worse is a o.t.e advertised and when you get to that part it turns out 35k o.t.e means 22k basic with target of 50hrs a week and other things like call out and bonus.

It’s not just salaries either, so many job adverts forget that recruiting is a two-way process. They give you a paragraph of preamble about how wonderful they think they are, a big long list of what they want, and absolutely no indication of what they’re offering at all.

They have just given you every indication/all you need to know then 😉

i was pretty fecked to find that my employer of 20 years was offering 20% more and immediate full benifits to new starters in the same role as me ( the benifits took 15 years to accrue..) for three years at annual review i was told no money to increase my salary or benifits..so i upped and left for marginally better.. 6 months later i got a call offering all and more besides.. i told them where to offer it..