As much as I now advise against it, I have in the past entered more than one interview without knowing how much the position paid. I entered thinking I would be told there was a finite amount I could be paid, and surely, the employer would offer me the top of their budget. And even if you are an honest and generous employer, you might recognize that this is not a very wise approach to take to interviews. Still, even though I could have done my research and found out how much an average worker in my field gets paid per year, I can’t take all the blame. If job postings never offer salary ranges to job seekers, a candidate’s salary expectation could merely be a shot in the dark.
More importantly, nowadays, I also recognise that many job seekers go into interviews planning on taking the first salary offer out of desperation. But this should never be an opportunity for employers to take advantage of job seekers.
Adding salary ranges to your job postings isn’t just about ethical recruiting, though. It’s also beneficial and in many cases, crucial to your candidate search. If you’re used to not including salary ranges in your job postings, this may not be intuitive, but you really will catch more candidates with salary transparency. Here’s why:
Our Top 5 Reasons for Adding Salary Ranges to Your Job Postings
Ever since The Great Resignation of 2021, many industries have seen a drastic shift from an employer’s market (a huge peak of which was during April of 2020, when nearly 2 million Canadians lost their jobs) to an employee’s market. In fact, many workplaces continue to face staffing shortages because of the massive number of workers who have “pivoted” from one industry to another. This means that every time you post a job (or someone else does this on the company’s behalf), the job posting has to really count. And this leads me into our first matter of discussion: why you should always include salary ranges in your job postings.
1. To Job Seekers, No Salary Ranges Are a Big Red Flag
And those job seekers might just be onto something. After all, many provinces across Canada are starting to make salary transparency on job postings legally mandatory. As a business newsletter from the Globe and Mail notes, “P.E.I. passed legislation this summer requiring salaries be included on all public job postings and B.C. is hosting consultations looking at implementing similar laws. (This comes on the heels of wage transparency measures enacted in 2021 requiring federally-regulated private sector employers to report salary data in a way that shows aggregated wage gap information.)”
And even if it’s not mandatory in the province/state/territory in which your organization is based, you may nevertheless be missing out on countless qualified candidates.
In fact, many candidates entirely ignore job postings without salary ranges. As well, perhaps even more pointedly, many candidates are actually searching jobs online with filters that order job postings by highest pay. So, not including a salary range at all may send your posting to the bottom of the list, if at all.
2. Salary Ranges Can Help You Cut to the Chase
Even if you are able to find qualified candidates to interview without offering salary ranges in your job postings, your interviews may take longer than they need to and may even lead no where unless you and your candidates are all on the same page. That is, many interviews might lead no where if they find out the pay is not sufficient mid-interview.
So cut right to the chase and be honest about what you are and are not able to offer your employees in compensation. If the pay has to start low, make sure to state so clearly, but always be transparent about opportunities for growth within the company if there are any for this candidate. After all, growth and pay-increases may just be what gets and keeps your candidate on-board for the long-haul.
3. Keep Your Employees Happy With Honest Wages
If you’ve ever lost an employee to another employer, you’ll know how devastating it can be to try to replace them. Sometimes it works out, but other times, it can be a costly, tiresome, and fruitless task. And sure, you could try to keep a leaving employee by offering to price-match or increase their pay to above your competitor’s offer.
But this may only be a band-aid solution, since it shows the employee you may have had the means of paying them a higher salary all along, and it took them threatening to leave to get a raise.
This is all to say that starting with and maintaining salary transparency can be crucial to employee retention. And even if your employee isn’t necessarily looking for another job elsewhere, a lack of salary transparency between you and your employees can still breed resentment in the workplace.
As Jack Kelly writes for Forbes, “If an employee finds out that they are underpaid, compared to a co-worker, it will be easy for them to become bitter and unhappy in their job—even if they loved it before.”
In fact, we encourage employees to discuss their salaries with one another to ensure there is no prejudice within the workplace, especially against women or racially marginalized workers. And this brings us to our next reason for salary transparency: the wage gap in the workplace.
4. Salary Transparency Shows You Care About the Wage Gap
Anyone can claim they’re an equal employer, but not everyone actually is. In fact, as mentioned in a previously posted blog, a 2021 survey revealed that women only earn on average 84% of what men earn per year. And if a marginalized employee finds out that they’re paid less than their (white, male, straight, able-bodied) counterparts, they will likely lead feel disrespected and discriminated against.
Being transparent about salaries, then, shows that you can prove you value your employees equally and compensate them all accordingly. And this can be huge for both employee retention and your employer/organisation branding for if an employee does eventually leave. (We can’t forget about GlassDoor and other equivalent websites that stand for honesty and transparency.)
5. Improves Your Employer Branding and Company Branding
If you’re on any social media at all, you might’ve seen the many memes that poke fun at the overused and meaningless buzzwords many employers use in their job postings. Many employers, for example, will boast about having competitive wages, then not offer a range to even offer what “competitive wages” mean. And offering this kind of job posting isn’t just detrimental to your candidate hunt. It’s also detrimental to your online branding.
After all, candidates and clients who may stumble across your posting may associate a lack of transparency (as well-meaning as your reasons for not including salary ranges may be) with a lack of fairness in pay and employee treatment. So, even if you notice your competitors offering higher paying positions than you’re able to afford, maintaining transparency over a lack thereof will always be more favourable to your and your company’s branding overall.
So, have we convinced you to include salary ranges in your job postings now? If you’re looking to start posting your jobs in the right spot to find the right kind of candidates, look no further than the Workwolf platform!
Click here to sign up for a Workwolf business account and start finding quality candidates today.
Need a bit more direction? Check out our blog on all you should include in a job posting. Happy hiring!
