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NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

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Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#101

I get why employers would hate this, but overall, wouldn't greater transparency in the labor market drive economic growth by virtue of making the labor market more efficient by doing a better job of connecting skilled, hard-working and motivated employees with employers who can pay more?

Exactly, I'm a bit surprised that this needs to be legislated. Many people will not apply/respond to recruiters if the salary isn't posted. I'd think employers would be doing this simply because it makes things easier for them.

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#102

I'm a recruiter. I've known for a long time it drives people nuts that job ads don't have salary, or have a wide salary range. The fact is that many employers don't actually know what they would be willing to pay someone . Until they have met them, assessed them, heard what they salary target is and weighed it up against their skills and experience and calibrated it against the team. The conversation almost always go…

> Go ask your team lead/CEO/CTO how recruiting works. I've been the team lead and talk to my team lead about this a lot and I know of no serious tech companies that don't actively think about employee retention and recruiting a huge part of which is compensation. Leadership at my company spends a serious amount of time discussing and revising our TC targets. Any company that doesn't know what "they would be willing t…

So what is the precise number you pay your senior developers?

Sorry to call you out, but I simply don't believe the answer is anything but "it depends on a range of factors". Unless it is a government job, but even then, likely it depends on a range of factors, and often even government clients flex their budget to meet their recruiting goals.

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#103
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dude who created the react framework (who I happen to know) already knows his worth, and is not getting jobs through public listings. This law isn't for him. Also he is getting higher level jobs. And that's true even further down the line -- if your experience can mean $200K more per year, then those should be two different job listings. One senior and one junior.

This law applies to anyone in New York with no stated exceptions for outliers. If he ever works for a company/satellite office there, whether remote or on-site, he's as much a member of the job market as anyone else. Any company interested in hiring him would obviously provide a massive number at the higher range.

But they would never make a job listing for the job. They would just reach out to him and ask for an interview. Actually they would reach out and ask to have a discussion about what he wants to do next, and it would be a multi-month effort of convincing him to even apply, including informal meet and greets with the team. There would never be an open req.

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#104
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your client tells you secretly that the base salary range for the position is 200K-250K. And the prospective employee tells that s/he wants 150K. Would you disclose that s/he can ask up to 250K or would you rather make your client happy by getting them a bargain?

>> would you rather make your client happy by getting them a bargain Recruiters are usually paid based on a percentage of the salary. It's actually in the interests of the recruiter that you are paid as much as possible, strictly speaking. In reality, my goals as recruiter are: * happy client * find a new employee who the employer is super happy with six months down the track * find a new employee who wants and enjoy…

> Recruiters are usually paid based on a percentage of the salary. It's actually in the interests of the recruiter that you are paid as much as possible, strictly speaking.

Seems like a recruiter is much more likely to double his compensation by spending half as much time per hire versus paying twice as much, given that salaries are relatively inelastic. Similarly, real estate agents are incentivized to get a pretty good price but mostly optimize for lower effort per sale.

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pricing transparency eliminates economic triage and uncertainly: if you want to make $XXX, you don't have to apply to 10 different jobs and spend everyone's time determining whether they'll pay you $XXX.

You still don't know if they'll pay you $XXX. You only know that they claim that there exists some hypothetical employee to whom they'd in good faith imagine paying $XXX.

Ranges have lower bounds. There is some subset of people for which this reduces the uncertainty to zero.

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#106

I'm a recruiter. I've known for a long time it drives people nuts that job ads don't have salary, or have a wide salary range. The fact is that many employers don't actually know what they would be willing to pay someone . Until they have met them, assessed them, heard what they salary target is and weighed it up against their skills and experience and calibrated it against the team. The conversation almost always go…

>If it makes you mad that job ads do not list salary, then there are good reasons and you will just have to get over or it not apply for that job.

Well, not for long, if I live in NYC and this rule passes.

>It's that easy - if the ad doesn't specify salary and that is a key requirement for you, don't get angry, just don't apply.

If this type of regulation spreads, we can just turn this into a nifty fliparoo counter-argument: It's that easy - if not posting a salary range is a key requirement for you, don't get angry, just don't post. Maybe ask the HR manager to do a quick skills upgrade and program in C# themselves.

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't actually know what they would be willing to pay someone. As an employee, sounds like not my fuckin problem. I'm not about to go through 3 phone screens, a take-home test, a full-day onsite, etc. just for the privilege to be low-balled or even worse denied. > I think it will be about $X Oh! So looks like it's not that hard to ball-park a number off the top of your head. I don't get this "how the world really w…

Recruiters should be talking about numbers in the first interview. Employers should have a sense of what your number is and whether or not they can get there before moving forward with interviewing. If they're not doing that, they're wasting your time and their time.

> If they're not doing that, they're wasting your time and their time.

Actually, they're getting paid for the their time. I'm not. I'm actually burning my time.

> Recruiters should be talking about numbers in the first interview.

I'm going through the recruitment process right now and the numbers out of the gate are always lowball figures (possibly personalized to me), because of two reasons.

Because they want to see if you accept it or not. I'm sure a lot of people coming into the bay area from other cities/countries will be like "wow, 185k, that's awesome" & they'll figure it out that the company was willing to pay upto 350k for the same work.

Secondly, publicly advertising salaries have a big impact on the people who are already in the building. This is pretty much already a problem when you bring in an H1B who has to put their salary into the DoL database and post notices in the offices with their pay. But this is only base pay, not including bonuses or stocks, so it's easy to cap the base pay and fill it up with bonus packages.

So the companies are legitimately balking at this because they'll have to pay their existing employees more if they put out an attractive posting, but if they put a lowball figure nobody would even show up to interview - only people who already make lower than the lowball figure will show up & then try to negotiate upwards.

I'm currently interviewing and this is a weird dance, sort of like buying a car.

I've only got a single response to someone asking "Is this range acceptable" - "I'm looking at multiple offers and being the second best offer is no good for you and I'm not negotiating before an interview or comparing offers. It's your bid, not my ask".

I guess it's a position of privilege to deal from. My need to go to back to work isn't economic, I'll just languish if I don't find a job & become truly feral :)

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#108
post #37

I genuinely wonder how this would work for non-cash portions of the total comp. Would they have to declare the dollar value of the shares issued? What about non-public companies that offer a significant chunk of the comp in illiquid stock options?Would they have to be included as a part of the salary range? Disclaimer: I am neither opposed nor in support of this. I don't mind taking that route and seeing how it works…

I have a hard time believing this will meaningfully help workers. It's a way for large companies to crush smaller competitors who offer anything other than base salary. Small co that offers more flexibility in location / hours? You will get filtered out because adding a salary filter is the easiest thing possible. Getting someone to read the JD that explains why working for you makes sense is hard.

Smaller companies have always had to compete on non-salary benefits like flexibility, and jobseekers who actually value those things above a higher salary will presumably be motivated to look into them, as they have always done as well. It's still helpful to know if your actual paycheck is going to be in range of your expectations or not before you waste your time applying to jobs.

Re: NYC to require salary ranges be included in job postings

#110

As an employer, I am reticent to name a salary range because the fact is that the return on investment of employees is not normally distributed; it follows a power law where the top people return many times the amount of an average person. This may be because of connections, experience, intelligence, or a mixture. When I recruit I always want to hire a top person for whom I'm happy to pay 50% more than an average per…

Eh I'm not sure this argument holds up.

You can post a job ad targeting the top people and list the top of market salary band.

If you can't find such a candidate, you can delete the job ad and post the ad targeting the "average person".

You may even be able to post the two ads simultaneously.

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