Re: No Salary History (was: In Defense of Salary History)

[Jean Pfleiderer <pfleiderer_j -at- WIZARD -dot- COLORADO -dot- EDU>]

In article <+769+VY8rjB -at- ismtp -dot- banyan -dot- com> Mark Boyer <MBoyer -at- banyan -dot- com> writes:
>From: Mark Boyer <MBoyer -at- banyan -dot- com>
>Subject: Re: In Defense of Salary History
>Date: 12 Jun 1995 21:29:45 -0000

> A hiring individual is
>reluctant to say what the salary or salary range is because he or she
>doesn't want to pay more than he or she can get away with.

Of course.  The annoying thing was an earlier post that tried to pretend that
this wasn't the issue.  There is absolutely no other reason I can think of for
a prospective employer not to state the salary range, or to ask for a salary
history.

 Salary ranges in
>many companies are quite wide; and a company HR person doesn't want to
>spend more than necessary and often pressures a hiring manager. Assume, for
>example, a candidate is making $32k, and that the job opening I have has a
>salary range of $30,000 to $49,500 (that's a real range, by the way). My
>goal may be not to exceed the range's midpoint of $39,900. Even that,
>however, would be more than a 20% increase for this candidate (and my HR
>rep would kill me; but more importantly, I have to consider the fairness
>vis a vis what others on staff make). The bottom line is that I'm reluctant
>to state a range.

As to your HR rep killing you, if the candidate gets the job without having
stated a salary history, neither you nor your rep will ever have to know that
you might have done better.  And then again, maybe you wouldn't have anyway;
maybe this person feels he or she deserves such an increase and is out job
hunting only in order to get it, and would not take your job at one penny
less, regardless of your opinion that this is more than you should "need" to
pay.

Who blinks first will depend on how badly you want to fill the position with
this person, and how badly this person wants to fill this position.  It's
negotiation, it's bargaining, it's haggling, if you will.  But there is
absolutely no reason why as a general rule an applicant should be any MORE
ready to tip his or her hand than the employer is.  There is something very
distasteful to me about a company that starts out wanting to know how little
they can get away with paying me before they know anything else about
me--which is what a request to "state salary history" as part of the
application says to me.

>If I had the job spec to do over again (and it looks like I will), I would
>probably be more specific about the number of years of experience and I was
>looking for and ask candidates to state their salary requirements (though
>that is still a cop out).


Yes, it is, and I for one won't do that, either, at least not initially.  I
guess I feel that if the prospective employer and I can't have at least one
conversation on the phone or by e-mail about the job, the company, the
community where it is located, etc., before we start worrying the money
question, the job is probably not for me in any case.  I have to work to eat,
but I do try to work at things that engage my interest, and I like to think
the people I work for are interested as well in the quality of my products,
the quality of their work environment, and the people who work in it, not just
the bottom line.

Jean Pfleiderer