
Ask HN: Salary history in background check - ethanhunt_
I accepted a new job, and they are initiating a background check through a 3rd party service. That service is asking for my employment history, and my starting+ending salary at each past employer.<p>Is it reasonable for me to decline to provide the salary information (or to fill in $0 in each field if it&#x27;s required)? I didn&#x27;t provide my current salary to them in negotiations (so I have no need to &quot;prove&quot; it to them), and I do not want my salary data to be present in yet another online system (that will probably be hacked at some point so my salary data will be publicly accessible in a .torrent data dump).
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kafkaesq
It's perfectly reasonable for you to decline to provide that information. It's
also perfectly for them to decline to provide employment (or consulting
business) on the basis of it.

I also don't like to provide these numbers; my usual (in my view, perfectly
ethnical and justified) dodge goes as follows:

(1) I give them 1 or 2 numbers that are easily verifiable -- and which I don't
mind being "leaked" \-- e.g. FT salaries at bigcorps in the past few years.
This is in accordance with basic game theory / negotiating strategy (whereby
if you make a partial concession to people, they feel they have an "out" and
and can save face, rather than press you for a full concession to what they
were asking for).

(2) As to the rest, I say "my clients / employers have asked that this
information be kept confidential, and I'd like to honor their requests."

Your suggestion to raise the issue of unintentional leaks (due to concerns
about cloud security) is quite excellent, and I may incorporate it into my
dodge strategy, also.

The bottom line is that most of the people asking are basically drones who
don't really know why they're asking, just that someone told them to (or they
have some vague sense that it will provide them with some kind of negotiating
leverage).

At the end of day, you don't have to play their games -- but keep in mind that
you'll incur a 30% or so automatic rejection chance for doing so, across the
board. My gut feeling is that companies that are sticklers aren't really all
that desirable to work for, anyway.

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seiji
Background checks should only happen _after_ you accept the employment offer
and full compensation package. Then it doesn't matter if they discover you
made $24,000 last year but now they hired you for $250,000 per year this year.

The background check is unavoidable. It's a liability maneuver for the
employer. The most invasive check I've had is them just requiring two years of
prior tax returns (I think to verify employment because the previous employers
no longer existed).

As far as wording about your private data being hacked in the future, that's
just the world we live in. You can't avoid it if you want to live within
current societal normals. (Also, for many jobs, salary information is fully
public like all government positions.)

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dudul
Don't provide the information if it makes you feel uncomfortable. It is none
of their business, did they provide you with the salary of the guy you are
replacing? If they decide to halt the hiring process because the 3-rd party
reported that you did not comply you should be happy you didn't end up working
for this company.

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zhte415
Do past employers actually provide this?

My past employer in the UK was absolutely clear to everyone that joined
something like "For staff that resign, we will only verify date an duration of
tenure, and department and position title. All current serving staff are
prohibited from providing references and endanger their position by doing so,
etc..."

Living in China, and with both very large and smaller companies (international
and local) in HR or close-to-HR functions, the HR manager would most likely
meet this request with the delete key on their keyboard, or at best a canned
response.

I share this because I'm surprised employers would actually disclose this, for
how it can feed back on their own operations (for example, a predatory
competitor using this information).

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hwstar
Governor Brown vetoed AB1017. This would have prohibited employers from asking
for salary history. It would have been interesting to see the reaction of
employers if this has been signed by the governor.

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__glibc_malloc
I've had a company say they will "verify" my salary for my first internship.
How is this possible that they verify it? Essentially, it is not public
information.

