

Tell HN: Why I Don't Apply to Jobs That Request Salary History - MichaelCrawford

The very first real resume I ever wrote had my pay at each position I&#x27;d held.  The Caltech Student Employment Office advised me to omit my pay history as it would make it unlikely I would ever get paid much more than I previously had.<p>Just now I found a craigslist post for what I felt would be a really good job for me.  I contemplated responding without my salary history, then decided not to respond at all, as I feel that so much as to request a salary history likely indicates that the company does not have ethical employment practices.
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anon3_
Startups have a perception they have a lot of choices. Everyone copies and
pastes, they get flooded. They are just A/B testing ways to filter through
candidates.

Don't take the rules too seriously. Simply respond by asking you're expecting
the market rate for what your position is. If they press, pursue another lead.

It's a numbers game for both sides.

Don't take it personally - finding talent and interviewing is very impersonal
and mechanical. Keep applying until you find someone who will interview on
terms of your technical merit and value you could bring.

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dalke
It's an asymmetric information thing. They get to know what you are paid, so
what you are likely looking for. While you don't get to ask them their pay
scale for your position.

The same with salary negotiation. If they ask "what's your salary range?", and
you answer, then they have more information.

Salaries should be public information.

~~~
greenyoda
_" They get to know what you are paid, so what you are likely looking for."_

Except that the two aren't necessarily correlated. You may have been grossly
underpaid in your last job and may be looking for a lot more. This could have
happened because your were hired at an inappropriately low salary (e.g., you
were right out of school and didn't know much about the job market). It's also
possible that you weren't underpaid when you were hired into your last job,
but your last employer failed to give you raises commensurate with your rapid
growth, leaving you underpaid after a couple of years.

Ideally, companies should pay you what you're worth in the job market _today_
, not some percentage above what your last salary was. If you have two equally
qualified job candidates whose only difference is that one made a lot more in
their last job, why should that be an excuse to offer them vastly different
salaries?

On the other hand, there are people who don't mind making a lot _less_ than
they did in their last job. Maybe they want to move into a new area that they
don't currently have much experience in. Maybe they want to move from a
management role back into a developer role. If an employer summarily rejects
them because their last salary suggests that they'd ask for too much, they
could be losing out on a valuable candidate.

~~~
dalke
I did say "likely". It is of course not necessarily true. It could also be
that you want to work for free.

To return to the topic, is there an ethically good reason for a company to
want to know your current or previous salary?

~~~
topkai22
To eliminate candidates that are out of their salary range. If their absolute
cap for a position is 85k, it's a waste of time to even have the hiring
manager look at résumés of people currently making 140k.

The less good but still perfectly ethical reason is the aforementioned
information asymmetry. The hiring company (especially if it's a smaller
business posting on Craigslist) probably doesn't know the market real well.
They may be trying to figure out what they'd have to spend on the position.

An employer may also want to see increasing salary within your previous roles
as a evidence of success there.

While asking for salary history in the job posting is a not a great signal
about the company culture and cash position, it's not unethical in and of
itself. I would just tell them you aren't comfortable discussing salary
information at this stage. Let them make the next move. I don't like when an
employer eliminates me a possibility based on a single point of information,
so I try to not judge them too much till the interview stage.

~~~
dalke
As greenyoda already pointed out, there can be people who make 140K who don't
mind making a lot less than they did in their last job. My dentist decided to
quit and become a musician. A friend took a job with a pay cut because his
wife moved for her job - it's easier for a system admin to find a new position
than a philosophy professor.

In any case, you don't like employers who eliminate based on a single point of
information, so you must not like an employer who eliminates candidates only
because their current salary is well over the available funding. That doesn't
sound like you like their use of that information.

And that signal level is going to be lousy. The primary signal is the job
roles/work experience. I can't see salary adding much useful information. In
some areas, like government, salary is closely tied to one's job position,
with only some variability based on skill level. There's almost no information
there in the first place, much less something that's easy to disentangle.

It would also say that Lilly Ledbetter wasn't as successful at her job as her
male counterparts, because she was paid less, even though the reason she was
paid less was due to 1) discrimination on the basis of sex, and 2) a policy of
not revealing salary information.

If someone wins the startup lottery then spends the next few years working
part-time to spend the rest of the time working on Linux kernel development,
then said employer will regard the person as being unsuccessful, because
options aren't part of the salary information.

At another friend's startup, the employees took a pay cut for a year, to help
with cashflow problems while they did a pivot. That didn't work, so they
looked for new jobs. Again, your supposed signal would indicate that those
employees must each be individually unsuccessful.

Sure, asking a job candidate about marital status, or children, or where the
candidate goes to church is not "unethical in and of itself." But these are
not standalone questions completely uncoupled from the interview process, so
your idea of splitting is apart is somewhat ridiculous.

Again, I say that all salary and income information should be public. Then all
sides will have an idea of what the market is like. The salaries for
government employees in the US are public, as are all the salaries in some
countries, so it's not like keeping this information secret is essential for
the organization's well-being.

