Salaries on Job Postings

Overview of Issue

In a recent survey, 91% of job seekers and 67% of recruiters want a salary to be listed on a job description. However, only 12% of jobs posted list a salary according to a Ziprecruiter interview with CNN. This issue has gained recent attention with legislation moving swiftly across the country and prominent leaders calling for transparence and equity.

And yet, many employers still express reluctance about including the salary in the job posting.

Watch the video below for our argument about the benefits for companies including salaries in job descriptions, featuring Peak’s Clarence Augustine.

Looking Up Salaries Online

In our modern Internet age, more and more job seekers are looking up the salary, or expected salary, on tools like salary.com or glassdoor.com.

Salary.com is an aggregator of data that helps employers and job seekers estimate the compensation range of a given role in a given area.

Glassdoor, by contrast, relies on user information where past and present employees report what they made in a specific role at a specific company.

Increasingly, job seekers can get a pretty good idea of how much they’re worth to you.

Transparency is Key

91% of job seekers want to see a salary listed. They also want to know what the benefits look like, what their upward mobility paths look like, and how the company culture is. Job seekers increasingly are doing extensive research online before the interview to vet a company, just as the company is vetting them.

For staffing agencies, we seek to get as much of this information ahead of time as possible. This helps us to be able to better sell your role. This information is always useful but is downright critical in the current tight labor market.

Sharing the salary on your own job posting is also estimated to pull in 2-3 times as many views on various job posting sites. So, if you’re struggling to find people, you should really think about including the salary in the job description.

Pay Equity

It’s currently estimated that women earn 80 cents to the dollar that a man does. This problem is also experienced by various marginalized groups of people: people with disabilities, racial and ethnic minorities, and LGBTQIA+ people. When a group is historically disenfranchised, they may be less likely to negotiate for the competitive wages earned by their peers.

Pay equity is still a huge problem in the workplace and including a salary on a job description is one of the first and easiest steps a company can take to beginning to correct for this continuing issue.

Why Companies Don’t Include Salaries

Companies might be reluctant to include salaries on job posting for a couple reasons (and why those arguments are flawed):

1. Attempting to payroll lower costs – many companies feel that they can get away with lowballing candidates in order to keep costs low. This often increasingly feeds into existing pay equity disparities. Also, candidates can just look it up online and will lose trust in your organization when they find out you’re lowballing them.
2. Not enough budget for required skill – some companies may not have the budget for the skills and abilities they need to recruit for so they don’t include a salary in order to get some unsuspecting candidates to accept the role. This will probably leave you spinning your wheels with recruiting and experiencing a higher turnover rate, thus costing you more money in the long run. You must pay people what they’re worth.
3. A company is worried about their existing employees pay – finally, some companies are concerned about their existing employees finding out what their new hires are making. Ultimately, this is an issue with pay equity and a company should be paying new employees close to what their current ones are making. Attempting to cover this up will lead to significant turnover and job dissatisfaction.

Let’s Talk about Salary Bands

Unfortunately, the other mistake many companies make is including a really wide salary band that doesn’t give an accurate expectation of how much people will actually be earning in the job. This too can drive a negative perception of the company as perspective employees suspect you’re trying to trick them into a role.

Try to express, as transparently as possible, the base salary (before commissions and bonuses) and keep the range between $5,000 – $10,000.