Ask HN: Are you more likely to apply for a job that discloses salary upfront?
I started to work on a job board to improve my Node.js / MongoDB skills and I'm thinking of actually launching it. But how do I make my board different from all others? I'm thinking of having a mandatory salary field so that each job would contain a salary range.
Stack Overflow data shows that job ads with salary receive 75% more clicks. https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/07/salary-transparency/#75. Other job sites are reporting 20% - 30% increase in job applications for ads with salaries.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadGiven that job titles aren't able to help me discover whether an opportunity is right for my next career move, salary ranges help me to gauge whether I'd be moving up a ladder and save me time from having to schedule something only to find out that they were really looking for juniors.
The question you may want to ask instead is: "Does the benefit to the job seeker of having a salary range specified outweigh the loss of potential advertisers who do not want to disclose a salary range?"
If you're just doing this as a side project, with no expectation of making a business out of it, then you may want to lean more toward what benefits the user.
If you're trying to run a business and pay the bills, you might need to think more about how it decreases your potential revenue, assuming the job advertisers are the ones who are paying for your service.
One other thing: Salary range is inherently a fuzzy concept. It's possible to set limits (e.g. the range must not span more than $20K, or the range must not constitute more than 20% of the lower-end number) but then you have to take into account that an advertised salary range is not necessarily the same as what they're ultimately willing to offer you. And then you have to factor in benefits, etc., which can make salary ranges misleading.
Edit: One possible way to make salary range disclosures more palatable to advertisers is to borrow a strategy from matchmaking systems: The advertiser discloses a salary range, and the job seeker discloses a minimum required salary, to the website, which does not make any of that information public. When the job seeker submits an application for a job, they receive a notice if the advertiser's specified salary range does not meet their minimum requirements. This keeps the actual salary range out of public view and at least slightly difficult to estimate, but it prevents the job applicant from wasting their time.
I live in Finland (5 million habitants) and based on my research only about 5% of job ads include salary. It's not part of the culture to discuss salaries publicly so it's very well possible that companies won't be willing to go public.
On the other hand, I think it's quite promising that there are even a few companies that are already publishing their salary offers, despite most of the competition not doing it.
I see it as my job to convince them it's good for their business and start a little revolution. Maybe others will join the bandwagon?
Even if it wee anonymized I think it'd be a fascinating dataset to play with.
I spent ~8 months working on two different startup ideas in the hiring space, one with a cofounder who'd been researching it for close to a year before I came along. We also started with grand ideas of making hiring easier for the jobseeker. The problem is that jobseekers do not have money - hence why they need a job - and so all the money in the hiring space comes from the employer. Like any other competitive market, hiring is subject to the Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
That's why getting a job sucks so much. It's a process that's entirely designed to benefit the company offering the job, not the person seeking the job. And lest you think you can just force companies to make their hiring processes more employee-friendly (we did), consider what happens if they say no. You'll have no listings, and without any listings, you have nothing to offer the jobseeker.
In any case we are discussing passive job searches. I'm not going to take the time to apply to a great job if I already have a great job, in the hope that they might meet my salary requirements. I might however use salary as a metric in initial search.
The best data from a job seeker's perspective isn't a salary range, which is a signal about what to expect that you chose, it's making public but perhaps anonymous what your developers actually make, which are facts.
It's a market. Efficient markets don't have secrets.
On another note, one thing I've been thinking of doing, (and I'd be delighted if you did it!) is a job board that only shows positions with take home interviews instead of in-person coding exercises. I think this is a growing trend as people realize that they're missing out on good developers who suck at coding under pressure with someone looking over their shoulder. I've come across several threads on HN with people saying the same thing.
So what do they ask in the phone interview? "How would you reverse a linked list?". Yeah, no. They didn't even bother to call back after I'd bombed it. It struck me as a bit weird that they went to the effort of coming up with a competition and then chucked the winners through the usual loop.
The issue was that the comp contained a lot of stuff that you couldn't deduce in 10 minutes. For example, all-shortest-paths graph search, performing huge calculations (e.g. stuff that blows up extremely fast), monte carlo simulations and other bits and pieces. It would have made for a much more interesting interview.
It's a colossal waste of half a day or so plus all the conversations.
No salary range usually implies generic ad from some half assed agency trying to get people on their books
You know what I wish I had in a job search? Let me post a profile, not a resume, but give me a survey. Let employers search for me based on what I'm good at... where my strengths are. Focus the hunt not on "who has the best skills" but rather "who's going to round out my team". The idea that specific technical skills can be acquired easier than personality traits.
So here's the traits I'd look for. Every engineer has a mix of motivations, some care more about tech problems, others care more about business problems. Then honestly some are just more concerned about growing their career. All 3 personalities have equally important traits that are essential to a team. A good team should have a tech guy to make sure what it builds is maintainable, it should also have a guy who is always making sure what the team is building is valuable, and then frankly if you have both of these guys they're going to constantly disagree with each other... so you need another guy who will take both viewpoints into account and determine what's better for the company.
The only time this is the case is when you aren't listing the job opening and instead are hiring someone specifically to recruit someone. If you are posting the job on your site or on some external site, you are not at that point yet.
I need to know that I'm not wasting my time pursuing what may become a low-ball offer, and I'm wholly unwilling to take a pay-cut, regardless of promises from the prospective employer.
Once bitten, twice shy, as they say.
If you really wanted to go crazy, make a publicly advertised email field mandatory, also. If I find a job posting and can't send an email to apply for it. I, most of the time, skip applying for that job. I might fill out a form that asks for just, like, my name, email and has a file field for my resume, but, it still rubs me the wrong way to fill that out. Give me an email address and let me write a small personalized note with a link to my resume. When you present me with a form to apply it makes me feel like I'm just a new datapoint in your recruitment database rather than, like, a human being just trying to start a conversation about how we can help each other.
I think it's an interesting point, but any results or replies are destined to lead to wrong conclusions. It's like doing UX research by asking people what they want instead of observing their behavior (i.e. prone to bias). So I wouldn't take any of the answers here as relevant.
Sometimes good benefits (NOT equity and soda, but 401k, healthcare, etc.) are so much better than the norm that I may overlook the salary being omitted and treat the interview as a discovery process.
And maybe that's a good thing for both sides.
I get so many recruiter spams, LinkedIn junk mail, contacts from former associates, etc. - most of which have absolutely no salary range - those that do and are high enough tend to stand-out in my mind, while a lot of the other ones are simply mass deleted every few days.
I'll get things like contracting gigs. I'll take one for a significant increase to offset stability. Recruiters offer my current rate +$5 and expect me to travel weekly and cover that cost... We're not even talking at that point.
On job searches I generally ignore any position with no range or "excellent compensation". I just feel like it's too low to list.
Everyone wants the highest number listed. This prevents employers from being honest, because that max range should be the MOST They want to spend, but to the applicant, it's the least they think they should accept.
It's frustrating as an applicant, and having been on both sides of this fence, I've stopped listing it because it's a very easy question to ask on a first contact: "Just so we're in the same ballpark, what kind of salary range are you looking for? I'm not going to hold you to whatever number you throw out because we've still got a lot to learn about each other, but I don't want to waste anyone's time"
I expect people to want to either make more money than they are now (I never ask that question, btw.. I think that's offensive IMO) or have a better experience in coming to work at a new job, and any manager worth working for should too.
It's also very easy to list in the ad so that everyone can not waste anyone's time in the first place. If you're going to answer it in the first phone call, just put it in the ad.
> This prevents employers from being honest, because that max range should be the MOST
The range is what is budgeted for the position.
It has nothing to do with stopping the company from being honest. Putting the range out there in the first place stops the company from setting the range by squeezing the applicants current salary as they try to get someone qualified for much less.
The problem with not posting it is this: most candidates who would have been a good fit for the position won't even bother applying. I'd prefer to post it and get the odd annoying candidate trying to negotiate up than not get any decent range of applications at all.
Personally, I'll just skim right on over a job advert that didn't bother posting the range. There are plenty of other good jobs from companies who do post it.
I think that a standardized band should be selected. Substantial sized bands, to dissuade purely financially driven people. You want them, but also as has been pointed out you don't only want them. You need a range. Bands give security that we are having the same conversation. I have also been interviewed for roles where the salary being offered is substantially below market value. What a waste of time tbh.
Also some way of getting at the intangibles would be great. For employees knowing whether this manager fires regularly, his feedback in the industry, etc would be helpful when selecting a role.
Cultural questions with answers are also good.
There is a great deal not be done to help the two seekers find the right connection and it's quite shocking really how prosaic the tools are for recruiting when you consider the money involved.
Is there any other kind of job hunter?
Financially driven... like the for-profit company you work for?
If I'd have to make the needle move by 100k, then I'm not going to bother.
If the range is not shown at all, I'll still apply, but I'll usually start with "While I negotiate salaries later in the process, my range is usually around X-Y, depending on the role".
Too many times I went through a phone screen, and when talk of salaries came up, it was just way off. And sure, phone screens are quick, but at that point I already had to deal with the silly pointless puzzles for 30-60+ minutes.
My tip is: don't be graceful. It's stupid, but the subjective perception people will get when you approach the topic straight up and say "I run 250k/year, is that within your range, before we go any further?" is powerful.
The first thing that happens is that you get slotted for the higher level positions right away, will talk to more important people, and do the more interesting interview (that is often not any harder than what they ask college grads. It's just less "please write a hashmap on a whiteboard!"), so you'll get the job anyway, but make 100k more a year or whatever.
It's dumb, but it's how the industry work.
I've found the best postings list their minimum ($70k+ or whatever). Maximum is irrelevant, as you can assume it's around 20% of that minimum. It shows what salaries and skill expertise they're after.