Britain to make salary disclosure in job ads mandatory

Then they went legal trying to prevent me working for a competitor.

I actually got what I needed from the role anyway, but it was a lesson to heed the red flags. I've not heeded that lesson a couple of times recently, just because the market seems to be toast, but it's not been worth it.

> Stretched over two months

These companies aren't Google. There is no valid reason why it should take so long to decide on candidates for a position. It is not necessary to have more than two interview sessions. I bail on any company that subjects people to this garbage.

I’ve similarly had 6-round interviews where at the end I either receive a lowball offer or am rejected because of something disclosed up-front.

Based on that, assumption was the budget would be adequate. Final response was that they would not even mention the salary because it was too far away.

Following week they posted the job advert for same staff engineer role but at under average eu minimum wage.

It's risky if no salary is listed but do not ever proceed if they don't openly accept your ask without any doubt.

with regards to uk tech companies - they have salary ranges like 60k-75k - where someone might have spent time in a role at 63k e.g if the average tenure within a certain position is 3 years, 63k - then when you join they will say new joiners start at 60k.

If i was good enough to get hired as a faang with just interviews and no take home stuff i see no reason to do that for a smaller company.

I've tried the opposite, paid everyone the same. But there were clear differences in ability and more importantly outside options. It became a problem when it came to retention and the business didn't have the ability to overpay everyone to keep the top performers.

I usually reply to the brush-off with "I only ask because the seniority level is reflected in the salary, not the role or the advertisement."

I say that because it is, in fact, true: the seniority/skill required for the role and duties/responsibilities dictates the pay, the bullet points in the advertisement and the role description is often completely divorced from the level of seniority or skill required in the actual role.

IOW "We're hiring a Senior dev" might have me respond "That's a Junior pay-bracket".

This always enabled the company to shift around who is the top 10% (whereas salary is locked in).

If these companies are just measuring salary and not considering RSU grants and bonuses, then you may see an overall reduction on salary, but (potentially) a collective increase on total compensation.

It's very hard for people to accept that this might even be the case, many people just assume that transparency is better for workers.

My first question to any recruiter is now always "what's the salary range for this role?" precisely because I've run into your first point earlier in my career. I'm not even particularly salary-driven (doing interesting, valuable work is far more important!) but it's the best indicator that the role is pitched at the right level for me.

From an employer's point of view, there's also the avoidance of future unpleasantness if (or, rather, when) it comes to light that some staff are paid significantly less than their peers.

Responsible employers don't need mandatory salary disclosures to do the right thing here but, sadly, not all employers are responsible so this sets a common baseline and ensures everyone plays by the same rules.

I hold no opinion on whether this is fair is not. Another applicant who is single, low mortgage may end up with more disposable income for less pay and subjectively be "better off" and effectively undercut me and my dependents that I support.

No system is fair. My only personal opinion is that any employee should be able to have representation in employment negotiations. That does not mean just unions, although they work for some, rather they could be a family member or a paid agent.

At the very end you can see what states they’re talking about and it’s basically just New York and California (no other state enacted a law 3 years before 2019).

California’s median income increased 17% from 2016 to 2019 (the 3 years following the law).

New york income increased 17% too.

Federally it increased 5%.

I think using some random spreadsheet as your data source just isn’t a great idea. NBER should be aware the IRS will let people have access to income data for research purposes.

It's why we require public companies to disclose their finances. How could a person, even in theory, know whether to invest otherwise? It's why we require sellers of houses to deliver an independent inspection report. Etc etc.

The converse is also why HFT companies make more money than croesus.

At least the young women in UK are outearning (and outeducating) young men.

A company has a fixed amount of money it can spend on wages. Reducing wage inequality means paying less to the best employees and more to the others, which is great if you just want to slack off but terrible if you're already one of the highest paid employees.

It is your fault if you allow the recruiting process to get to the third interview without at least knowing if the salary range is acceptable.

If you lack confidence in talking money, here is what you say:

"I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer."

You might add:

"$120K is my minimum but I am really hoping to find a role at the higher end - $130K is what I'm aiming for, depending on the job."

If, after saying all this, you get lowballed, then you have good reason to be very annoyed, and express calmly but clearly that you have had your minimum salary on the table since the first phone call." At that point you withdraw from the process and go look for a job with a professional company.

Recruiters at big companies will be told to advertise the role within the payband (the min to max pay for that role at that pay band)

So if you see a top end number and think you’ll get that, you probably won’t it will be around the middle of the range.

At that point you go back to the recruiter and state that you would expect the top end of the range. They may agree with you but then keep in mind that may also impact your salary increase at the end of the year, meaning a smaller increase for you compared to your peers which over several years would even out and out you back in the middle of the payband like your peers. This is why the common idea is to jump roles every few years.

That is only about 50% more than full time minimum wage!

I was like, okay, fair enough.

I played it completely wrong though. I should have just reframed it and said, well, I paid this, but you're not competing against my current employer, you're competing against Meta, who I'm also interviewing with this week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_Number

Again, member states miss European deadlines, but since it has no practical consequences, I don't see a why they would do it differently.

Also “in the last year” means only ~50% of that time is covered by when enforcement started.

Some countries have yet to pass any legislation too, this happens quite a lot if you look into past EU declarations, so companies there might be using that as a loophole to act as if not yet be effectively covered (in theory they could be taken to court over it, but that is can be complicated, or at least expensive, when there is no local legislation yet, so in practise it is far less likely to happen). What action will be taken by the EU to push things forward, I'm not sure, presumably there is some sort of fine for extended non-compliance? The question of who you are advertising to and where from can get a bit complex if you are a company in a member state that has not yet enacted anything, especially when you operate out of more than one territory.

Most of the jobs in that HN thread do give a salary expectation (though a few with a very wide range, which might be outside the rules, but they were US anyway so not covered), I don't think I saw an EU one in my quick scan that did not (at least one UK one, but again those are not currently covered by such rules).

As an employer that ruins one of the classic ruses that has been going on for a while: take someone through multiple interviews and then lowball the candidate who seems the most desperate.

If you believe in free market economics I think we can expect this to be a mess for a little while and then within a year or two it gets relatively efficient at dealing with the inefficiencies it’s targeting: younger people just not wanting to play the bullshit game where employers dangle generous starting offers, and then rug pull them to 2/3rds of that number; and to fix the gender pay gap (and the smaller reaching ethnicity pay gap).

However that consultation said this:

>We propose to introduce this requirement [pay transparency in recruitment] through a delegated power, enabling regulations to specify exact requirements. For example, the size of a salary range.

Example: https://www.enduranceenergy.com/careers/2af3b48c-4e20-420a-b...

https://westkite.com/careers-software-engineer

As far as I know, women who ask for more money are received less positively than men! So the risk/reward calculus for women and minorities are different, since ambition actually hurts you more.

any CEO who says that is also just in it for the money and wants to exploit employees.

what do you expect me to do? work for free?

So few candidates so rarely have the power to negotiate above what the hidden range already is, that this is a non-issue.

We really shouldn't be deciding policy based on the outliers, besides which those people (the outliers) that can dictate a number higher than the range already set aren't hired from advertisements anyway, making the whole "but we can't do this because it would affect those who don't apply respond to job ads"...

You are allowed to hire whoever you want. How could you come to your conclusion? You are allowed to hire people without making job ads at all, for that matter. You are allowed to hire 10 people for a position even if you only advertised 1. And of course you are allowed to pay more than initially advertised.

Says who? No one is saying you aren't allowed to go over the advertised range.

What? And sort your grammar out, I got a headache reading it.

Even if the minimum does apply everywhere, it fixes the inequalities gap that is causing so much economic drag in the UK: white men earn significantly more than any other demographic today for the exact same roles at the exact same companies. If everyone gets the bottom of the band, at least everyone gets the same, and that’s been an important goal for multiple UK governments of different political stripes over many decades for reasons to complex to go into here (and no, it’s not “political correctness”, it’s far more complex than that).

I also don’t think it likely means average salaries come down, I just think it means the distributions narrow.

I've spent my entire career on the other side of hiring and I've yet to encounter a single valid excuse for not knowing, and subsequently not advertising, a salary range. Before you hire, you need to know if you can afford to hire. If you know you can afford to hire, you know what you can afford to pay. It really is that simple.

In the US, the National Labor Relations Act covers this situation. The NLRB says that discussing wages/salaries is a covered "labor organizing activity" and it is a violation of the NLRA to prevent employees from discussing wages.

> If you are an employee covered by the Act, you may discuss wages in face-to-face conversations, over the phone, and in written messages. Policies that specifically prohibit the discussion of wages are unlawful as are policies that chill employees from discussing their wages. When using electronic communications, like social media, keep in mind that your employer may have policies against using their equipment for unauthorized use, though it is possible such policies could be unlawful.

> You may have discussions about wages when not at work, when you are on break, and even during work if employees are permitted to have other non-work conversations. You have these rights whether or not you are represented by a union.

https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-right...

29 USC 151-169 is the NLRA:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/29/chapter-7/subchap...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Act_o...

NLRB:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Board

The "complications" are basically employer and manager propaganda because the information asymmetry suits them better than people realising they are undervalued and leaving

Obviously it's not perfect. But as you say, it's a difficult problem. And salary ranges are at least something

if i apply despite not liking the range i can still say no and ask for more, but not knowing the range in advance is unlikely to raise the chance of that happening.

So what is the point of the law, if there are all these workarounds?

Mandatory Gender Pay Gap Reporting (Conservative Party 2017)

Pay Transparency Pilot (Conservative Party 2022) - (Participating employers only) list salary ranges on all job adverts and stop asking applicants for their salary history during recruitment