>But I wasted time interviewing some overqualified people too (because of salary/location expectations that should have been communicated up front).
Well that's your own fault as the job advertiser, and when I say "you", I mean almost all companies that advertise jobs. You almost never state the salaries to be paid, so tons of peoples' time gets wasted by pointless interviewing which gets followed up with insultingly low salary offers.
If you're a cheap-ass and want to pay a pathetic salary, you should state this in your job ad, so that non-deadwood people don't bother to apply to your job.
>This is a hard problem because some institutions write wish lists in their job reqs, and some write hard and fast requirements.
It's not that hard to tell the difference. When the word "required" is used, that sounds like a requirement to me. When a separate list is preceded by "nice to have", "plusses", etc., those are obviously skills that the company would like to have in a candidate, but are not hard-and-fast requirements. If the company is so stupid they can't write a simple job advertisement this way, and they use the word "requirements" or "required" when they really meant "nice to have", then they don't deserve any employees at all.
Why should the company lead with what they are willing to pay? Why is it on the company and not the possible employee? Why shouldn't every phone screen begin with the possible employee saying "this is my salary range" and politely exiting the call if the screener won't validate that the salary offered is within that range?
When I buy a car, the person selling the car sets the price. I can take it or leave it.
When I rent a house, the landlord sets the price. I can take it or leave it.
When I'm selling my labor as an employee, why am I not the person setting the price that the company takes or leaves?
I'll tell you why, because the first party to state a number in any negotiation is at a disadvantage, because the counter party suddenly has more information.
Now, there's a valid case that the employer/employee relationship is asymmetrical enough as it is (one employer -> many employees) that the company should give up that negotiating point, but if I ran a company, I'd want to justify that. (There's also a case to be made that, especially with knowledge work, the employee has an asymmetrical advantage because they know how hard they are working, and it's hard for the employer to know.)
That said, when I enter into a new engagement to sell my labor, aka an interview, I do my best to make sure they want to buy my time before I set a price. It's negotiation.
Edit: I love the parent comment even though we disagree, upvoted.
>Now, there's a valid case that the employer/employee relationship is asymmetrical enough as it is (one employer -> many employees) that the company should give up that negotiating point
That's exactly why I think the employer should give up that negotiating point.
The other reason is that employers are constantly whining about how they don't have enough engineers, can't find qualified people, etc., and then lobbying Congress to do something about it. Employees don't have this kind of political power.
Finally, I wouldn't mind if negotiation were simply eliminated with job salaries. You don't negotiate with the cashier at Walmart about how much you're going to pay for some vegetables or a TV. The price is the price, take it or leave it. It'd be better if everything were that way, so that consumers could compare things more accurately. There are many nations where the posted price is not the actual price, and haggling is expected and normal, even on something as mundane as groceries. Without exception, these nations are backwards and economic disasters. There's a reason for that.
There are many nations where the posted price is not the actual price, and haggling is expected and normal, even on something as mundane as groceries. Without exception, these nations are backwards and economic disasters. There's a reason for that
That's a big claim that you make very authoritatively. You should back it up, or change your wording to better express that you're making a hypothesis without much evidence.
Do you have any counterexamples? Haggling is very common in countries like India and various Middle Eastern countries. To say any of these countries have world-leading economies would be quite simply false. India's getting better, but it's basically adopting western culture.
Well as for some prominent examples haggling is considered bad form for small transactions in the nordic countries and they do kind of well. All the places I go to that have a culture of haggling seems to be way worse off.
I guess others can provide more data points that points in this direction but I'd also appreciate counterexamples.
What solipsism is objecting to ("big claim"/"hypothesis") is the statement "There's a reason for that", which implies that there's a causal relationship between the prevalence of haggling and countries being "backwards and economic disasters" (for which there's been no evidence provided).
Only the company knows how well they will be able to turn work into the money that they can use to pay the worker.
The candidate can show the ability to do whatever work the company may require, but if that work does not increase revenues in some way, it will not be able to keep the worker employed indefinitely. Obviously, there's a lot of room for speculation here.
The worker has a general idea of the average amount that many other companies might expect to value the work of similar workers. So the prospective employer has to signal that it can monetize the work more effectively than the median company to attract better than the median quality of candidate.
If your company is building yet another CRUD business app, you do not need above-median skills, nor could you afford them. If your company is building a new, Wall-Street-killing trading platform, you need the 99th percentile of skilled workers, and should therefore be offering 99th percentile pay, because the work will eventually be worth billions of dollars.
The candidate knows how much their labor is worth on the open market. If the prospective employer does not know how much the open position's work will be worth to the company, it really shouldn't be trying to fill it until it does know. If you want to reach the higher-quality candidates, you have to send a clear signal that they will not be rejected for wanting too much money, which happens all too often with companies that need to pinch their pennies or extend their runway.
There are companies out there that will hang up the phone if you say $100k. And there are also companies out there that will struggle to hold their poker face at being offered such a great discount on an employee. You won't necessarily be able to determine which is which before you apply.
When the company does not say up front, it is implicitly saying "we will pay you exactly what you are worth, as determined by negotiation, with no predetermined limits." If they wait until halfway through the second phone screen to bring it up, and then say, "that's more than we can pay", they are wasting the candidates' time.
That is why the company should lead with their salary maximum.
The analogy is not a fixed price on fungible goods in commerce. The candidate has a unique artwork, to be sold at auction. The auction house would very much like to establish that potential bidders have at least enough money on hand to meet the prospective employee's reserve price before giving any of them paddles, especially when the bidding procedure can last several weeks per bid. The candidate does not want the reserve to be known, as they would prefer to get a higher price. Likewise, the prospective employers do not want their maximum bids to be known to their competition. But as they can only complete the purchase by making the highest bid anyway, their wishes do not matter one little bit. You have no business bidding on a Van Gogh painting with only $5k in your pocket, looking for something nice to hang up in a hotel room.
The employer is the one that makes the offer. They are selling the pile of cash, and the employee either buys it with their labor, or leaves the offer on the table.
Actually, this is exactly the type of person I like to interview. One that's already thought ahead and read the posting and decided if it was even close to a fit lifestyle-wise for them, and technically.
Thank you. When I look for a job, I'm not looking for the very top salary (usually those go to the very top performers, which I'm not, I'm good but not top 1%, or are companies which expect too much time), but there are a good number of companies out there trying to get good people for bottom-of-the-barrel salaries. I don't want to waste my time on those places. They usually have other big problems in addition to poor pay too.
Honestly, I wish every job posting included the following:
- salary range (and an honest one too, not one where they post a mediocre low and a great high, but then never actually offer the high number to anyone and just offer the low number by default)
- work location - sometimes it's not that easy to figure out where a company's office is located, or they have multiple locations. The address is important, because it determines my commute time.
- office environment - is it open-plan, cubicles, offices, shared offices, etc. Some photos would be good.
- computing environment - do you use Windows (7, 8, 10), MacOSX, Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, etc.)? A combination? (RH in a VM for development, Windows for email/Office). What version control do you use? (git, SVN, or (ugh) ClearCase)
- standard benefits package: insurance company and regular single-guy premium, number of days off/year, etc.
- a fairly detailed explanation of the actual work involved in this position: what technologies you'll likely use, what the project is, etc.
- number of people in team, how team works together (Scrum/Agile, waterfall, etc.)
If companies would just post all this info with their job requisitions, it'd save everyone a lot of time. I see posting filled with paragraphs and paragraphs of flowery crap about how wonderful their "collaborative team environment" is or their corporate philosophy or whatever, but the things I listed above are what are important to me in a job and what will determine if I'm happy in that job. Spare me the flowery prose about how wonderful your company is; I'll make that determination on my own.
Well that's your own fault as the job advertiser, and when I say "you", I mean almost all companies that advertise jobs. You almost never state the salaries to be paid, so tons of peoples' time gets wasted by pointless interviewing which gets followed up with insultingly low salary offers.
If you're a cheap-ass and want to pay a pathetic salary, you should state this in your job ad, so that non-deadwood people don't bother to apply to your job.
>This is a hard problem because some institutions write wish lists in their job reqs, and some write hard and fast requirements.
It's not that hard to tell the difference. When the word "required" is used, that sounds like a requirement to me. When a separate list is preceded by "nice to have", "plusses", etc., those are obviously skills that the company would like to have in a candidate, but are not hard-and-fast requirements. If the company is so stupid they can't write a simple job advertisement this way, and they use the word "requirements" or "required" when they really meant "nice to have", then they don't deserve any employees at all.