What Salary Transparency Means to You as an Employee
New York will soon join Colorado in requiring employers with a minimum number of employees to post salary ranges for advertised positions. Some other states require employers to disclose wage ranges on request.
There are good reasons for this trend. There are known historical wage gaps between genders and races that need to be eliminated. These new laws are important steps in closing those gaps.
Aside from the value of reducing wage inequity, there are at least three benefits to jobseekers that such disclosure provides:
1. You’re not going into a conversation where the position is completely out of your ballpark of expectations. It’s extremely frustrating to go down the road on discussions about a potential job and then find out that there’s a big mismatch between your and the employer’s compensation expectations. Often an employer will ask a candidate early on about their salary expectations. (See my earlier blog post about how to handle that.) Providing salary transparency eliminates some of the awkwardness of this dance.
2. By looking at a cross-section of postings for positions of different seniority in an organization, you can get a sense of what additional compensation comes with greater skills and responsibilities. If a company that must disclose salary ranges is currently recruiting for several positions, including those up the rungs of the ladder of experience and skills, that provides visibility into the earnings potential of a particular career path. It’s better to have an early sense of earnings potential than to go blindly into a situation.
3. It allows you to see if you are being paid fairly in your current position. This provides an indication if you should explore other options or make the case that you should be paid more. Salary transparency in job postings helps you make good career decisions. There’s an entire industry involved in compensation benchmarking for the benefit of companies and their boards. Salary transparency now gives some previously opaque information to the employee for free. Getting such info prepares you for compensation discussions with your current employer. If you can’t achieve your compensation objectives at your current firm, it gives you the confidence to look elsewhere.
There is some wiggle room outside of published ranges if a candidate’s capabilities lie outside the previously considered position requirements. However, the employer must publish salary range expectations in good faith.
Of course, you can continue to do your research on compensation by simply asking around. But this newer stream of supplemental information is certainly a nice benefit.
I offer individualized career coaching and advising (remote and in-person) along with text, email, and phone support to help job seekers succeed. I've hired more than 100 people and interviewed over 500 candidates. I've worked at large global companies like Morgan Stanley and a company that is now part of Bank of America Private Bank and founded/worked at six startups. I welcome you to contact me and join my mailing list.