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New York City bans employers from asking potential workers about past salary

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Re: New York City bans employers from asking potential workers about past salary

#291

Post by mdb333 »

burkaman wrote: post #218
rodionos wrote: post #215

Don't have to ask. The data is open: https://gist.github.com/rodionos/b77080e028e3b680b2c1b5091ba... Source: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/civil-list-2014 > The Civil List reports the agency code (DPT), first initial and last name (NAME), agency name (ADDRESS), title code (TTL #), pay class (PC), and salary (SAL-RATE) of individuals who were employed by the City of New York at any given time during the indicated y…

This bill applies to private companies too. In cases where a company discovers your past salary without asking, the bill makes it illegal to rely on that to determine an offer.

good to know, I was wondering if this would include information from previous employers on background checks... which it sounds like it does.

Re: New York City bans employers from asking potential workers about past salary

#292

Post by Arizhel »

literallycancer wrote: post #64
nommm-nommm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful!! There's quite a few ways to verify past salary. Specially some employers report employment information to private databases and your potential employer runs a "employment report," like banks run a credit report, as part of a mandatory background check. To see if you lied. Of course, they can't do that without your permission but agreeing to a background check is a condition of employment. The database i am…

I'm not a recruiter, nor a hiring manager, but personally, I'd be more concerned about the competence of someone who answered truthfully. Yes, engineers probably aren't hired for being good at salary negotiation, but still.. it isn't hard to figure out that telling the truth isn't beneficial.

You obviously don't have what it takes to be a good HR worker.

(I mean that as a compliment.)

Re: New York City bans employers from asking potential workers about past salary

#293

Post by vkou »

imsofuture wrote: post #237
jnwatson wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anchoring only works if the potential employer is ready to buy. Many, many organizations will simply use the number as yet another filter, and you won't even begin discussions. By giving a number first, you're either too high and you won't have an opportunity to sell yourself, you're too low and you've literally already negotiated against yourself, or you're lucky and right at their expectation, which you could have…

Pricing yourself out of a job with an organization that uses salary as an first-line filter is maybe not the worst thing in the world. There are a lot of bad jobs in the world, you should be happy to turn down or be turned down by many jobs that you apply to. It's kind of a sad cultural trope that the employee is desperate for a 'yes' at every job they apply for, when that is often not true at all.

> Pricing yourself out of a job with an organization that uses salary as an first-line filter is maybe not the worst thing in the world.

"They try to filter people by salary" is not at the top of my list of reasons for why I wouldn't want to work somewhere. It's a reason, but it is dwarfed by many other ones.

Re: New York City bans employers from asking potential workers about past salary

#294

Post by benji-york »

dingdongding wrote: post #266
catshirt wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

care to share your position and some discreet information about the company (size, industry?)

This account was created an hour ago. I doubt he is telling the truth

I think the age of the account increases the likelihood of the story being true: the person was so compelled to tell their story that they created an anonymous account just to do so.

Re: New York City bans employers from asking potential workers about past salary

#295

Post by adrr »

nfriedly wrote: post #272

When IBM hired me, the only question I was asked about salary was "how much would you like?" I picked a number and he said "I think I can do that, let me check" followed the next day by "yes". Maybe I left money on the table, but I'm happy, and I've gotten good raises since.

More than likely you left money on table. I found asking people what salary they would like, they always low balled themselves with a 10% increase of current salary. Minimum i give is 15% because that is average for people changing jobs. Devops engineer i just hired was well under priced for the market so i gave him 45% raise. He didn't even ask for increase in pay.

Not every company/hiring manger is trying to rip off their employees. Paying people industry/local a bit above averages for the job duties makes for happier employees that are less likely to leave or have moral issues.

Re: New York City bans employers from asking potential workers about past salary

#296

Post by bitcrusher »

ryandrake wrote: post #203
tehlike wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in tech companies, bonus + equity is usually multiples of the base salary.

1. Parent post was just for illustration, he's probably not talking about his actual salary + equity. 2. Is that really true? Multiples? Maybe for the CEO! I've been in tech for almost 2 decades and have never seen an equity package of more than ~25% or so of base salary. Usually it's about 5-10%, no?

Depends on the company; My current employer added 2 times my annual in RSUs.

Re: New York City bans employers from asking potential workers about past salary

#297

Post by vkou »

mcherm wrote: post #179
josho wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hijacking this for visibility. If the recruiter asks repeatedly, a trick that I learned is to answer that it's in your employee confidentiality agreement not to discuss the terms of your employment. It's arguably a true statement as well (in case you were concerned about telling a white lie)--your employer could be considering your salary as confidential because they obviously haven't disclosed it publicly, so you ar…

> a trick that I learned is to answer that it's in your employee confidentiality agreement not to discuss the terms of your employment. Except that this is a lie. In the US, it is ILLEGAL to have an employee agreement that states this (at least if you are an employee potentially capable of unionizing). If I wanted to make up an untrue reason for keeping the data confidential, I would make up something more interestin…

> Except that this is a lie. In the US, it is ILLEGAL to have an employee agreement that states this (at least if you are an employee potentially capable of unionizing).

Then I signed an illegal agreement when I was working for one of the biggest investment banks in the United States.

I should really thank them for that - in future negotiations, once I said that my current employment agreement is confidential, prospective employers stopped asking me stupid questions about current salary.

Re: New York City bans employers from asking potential workers about past salary

#298

Post by komali2 »

louisswiss wrote: post #82
pmoriarty wrote: post #43

I never answer questions about my past or expected salary, not to employers and not to recruiters. Most employers don't ask, and the few that have (perhaps by having a part of an employment form ask for previous salary) have never made my leaving that information out an issue. Most recruiters, if they even ask, respect my decision not to talk about it, but I've been pressed hard on this by a handful of recruiters, an…

Agree with you in principle (your previous deal with company A is absolutely none of company B's business) but I would like to challenge you on one point: > I'm placed at a disadvantage in negotiations if I name a number first. ... This is unlikely to be true. Generally, in price negotiations it is advantageous to name a number first. This is known as anchoring and basically the theory is that the end result is bette…

I think you're confusing two sales concepts - first to talk, and anchoring.

Anchoring is a more general marketing concept that works well in advertisements (crossing out a black $280 and putting a red $100 underneath it). Anchoring doesn't work so well for something much more fluid (and with much more at stake) such as a salary negotiation.

In-person sales meetings (which is what an interview is, for both sides) are where "first to talk" come into play. It's a concept as old as war meetings between opposing roman generals. First to talk loses, period. Why? I don't know, but years of sales and recruitment has taught me that whoever slips is going to give the advantage to the other side of the table.

You can only hurt yourself by giving a number. The company has set a budget, either you fit or you don't. Maybe the budget is higher than you expected and you take the job for way more than you would have asked for. Maybe it's less and you don't take the job. The key point is that company is not the only company you are dealing with - you can move on to another. And another and another, and as long as you don't give your number, you will win out.

I can't share this data but when I worked at a bootcamp our analysis showed this as well. Students that gave their number got paid less. There's a big push for bootcamp transparency so hopefully that sort of info will get published soon.

Re: New York City bans employers from asking potential workers about past salary

#299

Post by ska »

zimzam wrote: post #119
jimparkins wrote: post #20

Have a google for: "can i lie to a employer about past salary" - it really really messes with people - people feel super uncertain about how to approach this situation. Throwing any confidence they have during the negotiation out the window. Even now I hesitate to write this as a million people will come out and say never lie - what if they found out. More than banning. There needs to be acceptance that if someone as…

Unfortunately there are employers in NYC who do call previous employers to verify salary. Remember that most white-collar employees are in much less demand than developers and have to deal with far more employer bullshit.

I've had prospective employers call for reference/jobs description check and ask this question. It's really easy to not answer, or to answer "market rates".

Re: New York City bans employers from asking potential workers about past salary

#300

Post by komali2 »

pc86 wrote: post #172
jnwatson wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anchoring only works if the potential employer is ready to buy. Many, many organizations will simply use the number as yet another filter, and you won't even begin discussions. By giving a number first, you're either too high and you won't have an opportunity to sell yourself, you're too low and you've literally already negotiated against yourself, or you're lucky and right at their expectation, which you could have…

This is why we publish salary ranges with our job ads but also require a desired salary within that range from candidates.

Problem is even with that I would wait for an offer from your company before saying a number, and then I would ask for more, because over the course of my career this has enabled me to consistently be paid more than average. So your "maximum" would be my minimum, and if I were to work there, I'd want more. Maybe that means I don't work there, that's fine, but it'll work somewhere else, eventually!
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