When I was last job hunting I ruled out all ads that didn't include a salary range. That was a good filter. I may have rejected some companies that would have hired me on more than I'm on right now, but that was OK. I don't want to work for a company that writes bad job adverts.
I also used the heuristic that the top of the salary range in the advert was the absolute maximum the role would pay even if I was a perfect candidate, so I could reject any adverts where the maximum was below my minimum. Another good filter.
Then I ignored the minimum on the assumption that job adverts, and recruiters, often seem to lie and there was a chance that I might be offered a role under the apparent minimum. However, I applied my own minimum salary by taking the value 1/4 between the advertised minimum and maximum; if they offered less than that I'd reject it because it meant they weren't entirely happy with me if they were offering near the bottom of the range.
All in all this meant my job hunt was quite stress-free and enjoyable. I could easily reject adverts and offers, and when the right one came along I knew it was a good match.
Knowing that I could do this with every role in the EU is a good thing.
My favorite type of bullshit listings here in Norway are typically like this (and they're _always_ sales jobs for scummy companies): Do you want to earn $150000?
Then in the listing, they point out that their top earners are making $150k-$200k-$250k or whatever, but add the small, small caveat that salary ranges from something like $25k and all the way up to those 10x performer salaries.
(But luckily, a lot of job listings here already include salary ranges. The majority being gov. jobs, and the private market tends to be higher than those again.)
If pay transparency is the goal it might be better to publish each employee’s pay. That way, at least it’s possible to connect the reasons why someone is being paid more or less (like experience, or extra responsibilities, etc). Few people are excited about that, though.
I’ve set pay for engineers at several companies. In my experience, employee pay levels have a very broad range with the max and min overlapping significantly between levels, making the levels not very useful for pay analysis. This is because of 2 things:
1) “Equal work” is mostly a myth in creative jobs like software. It’s an idea that we’ve inherited from factory work where the job types were highly regimented. In software and other creative fields, if you ask two different people to solve the same problem you’re likely to get two very different solutions. Across hundreds of people, the best solution might be 10x better than the average. That’s a big difference, and not like factory work at all. If someone is doing 5x-10x better work, and your company can make use of the surplus, should that person be more highly payed? What if your competitor is willing to pay more than you are currently paying her? Would you match? And what if matching would push up the top of the pay band?
2) Usually, the goal is to match the market pay (although this is sometimes laundered through various levels of abstractions like years of experience, degrees, etc). Levels can rarely be made detailed enough to model the full complexity of the market. Let’s say you have two mid-level engineers with 5 years of experience and similar work histories. One builds web UI and another is a security engineer. These two people are in very different markets. Security expertise is hard to hire right now (and has been for the last 10 years) and therefore pays 1.3x - 2x. But your company only has one level for “mid-level engineer.” You have the option of underpaying the security engineer, and thus expecting to lose them to another company willing to pay market rate, or pay them market rate yourself but have pay levels with enormous ranges.
We need that in the US as well. I'd also like to see sub-contracting banned.
There's no good reason other than me being taken advantage of, that there's 2-4 layers of middlemen eating my lunch when I'm the one doing the work. It should be mandated that "finders fees" are the only acceptable payment for middlemen, and I can only be paid directly by the origin employer. Enforcing this view on my own without a law, or the power of collective bargaining, is nearly impossible.
I understand this is how money is usually made, and many here are likely wealthy by taking advantage of this, but it is misaligning incentives.
For all its faults. There's some shining pieces of laws the EU has passed.
"1€ - 1,000,000€" is a range, right?
Flagged as title is significantly incorrect. It’s a proposal
Even if this gets approved, it still requires all the member states to change their laws.
Luckily for me, I already live in one of EU members that have such law in place. Allows me to discard job postings under my salary range.
Some job postings still have x - 5x ranges, but knowing the industry salaries, depending on how component the person is, I believe that it's actually the true range.
This should actually help companies too. If you find someone who thought you were paying 100 but you only pay 70, they're going to have wasted your time and their time doing interviews. Nobody wants to lead with "how much do you pay" so if the job doesn't say there's a degree of time wastage required.
How about doing something about the multiple between lowest and highest values in range? For instance putting their range in a regulator website and allowing them to be viewed by the job-seeker according to their own formula, weighting the multiple along with the range values?
Do they need to obey their salary ranges? If its a range, one group may negotiate a higher spot in that range still. To get equal outcome in pay, firms will have to disallow negotiation which would keep high achievers out.
That’s amazing news. I guess we will see more EU jobs going through recruiters and their “competitive salary” line.
Wouldn't this just make everyone post ridiculous ranges for job postings?
Salary range: 100 to 10,000,000 EUR
Finally some good news
Nice
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If the gender pay gap is more a result of evil men, and not from factors generally distributed in a bi-modal way between men and women, then legislation like this will not solve the root problem, and simply a different evil result will be revealed.
If it (the pay gap) has more to just do with differences between men and women and their choices, then this legislation might do more harm than good.
The transparency for job seekers is nice but I think the best parts of this law are those:
- Right to information for employees – Workers will have the right to request information from their employer on their individual pay level and on the average pay levels, broken down by sex, for categories of workers doing the same work or work of equal value.
- Reporting on gender pay gap – Employers with at least 250 employees must publish information on the pay gap between female and male workers in their organisation. For internal purposes, they should also provide information on the pay gap between female and male employees by categories of workers doing the same work or work of equal value.
Being able to compare your salary to the average in your company for the same job will be a real game changer.