Ask HN: How to handle recruiter who insist on knowing the current salary | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to handle recruiter who insist on knowing the current salary

2 pointsthrowrecruit8 comments

I had a phone interview with a recruiter for a well funded startup in Singapore. The recruiter scheduled it after I solved a programming puzzle.

After initial introduction and some details about the company, I said that I am looking for at least x salary (say 100k). The recruiter asks my current salary which I declined to say. Recruiter asks again and tells that I have to reveal the salary now or later before the offer is made. I declined, told him that it is my policy to not discuss existing salary. We ended the call quickly with the recruiter telling me to email if he ever reconsiders my position.

- How to handle these recruiters who always insist on current salary? It always happens here in Singapore.

- Did I handle it correctly considering that I didn't need the job badly?

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I don't know Singapore, but I'm US-based and do some contingency recruiting. It sounds like you were talking to someone at the company, and they can be more hard nosed about that.

My goal is to see if your salary target fit's in the company's range. If not, I don't want to waste your time, although in some cases you may be interested in getting less money for stock options and, well, all sorts of good reasons.

Most people volunteer their salary because A) I'll keep it confidential if they ask, and will share market salary info with them, and possibly B) they are confident they are well paid and want to use it as an anchor. If they give me their current salary and their target, I only pass on the target since it's the operative number. I have good clients who have no problem with that.

In your case, truthfully, I would have shared just to hear what their offer was. They don't know your salary now, but you don't know if they would have given you what you wanted because you halted negotiation. If you were looking for a fair market rate and they advertise compensation as "competitive," that shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks. Note to self: If talking to external recruiter, 1) check if they are willing to keep my salary confidential and 2) get market salary info.

Also, looks like it is good to have a big salary to anchor the target salary higher. You are out of luck if you were working on your own startup for past 5 years with a low salary

In your experience, how common is that candidates lie about/inflate their salary to keep the anchor higher? Was any one caught doing this?

Think someone posted this some time ago: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/org/noel.html

A recruiter does not have any right to your salary information. Their contract is with the client and they will do what is in the client's best interest. Salary is like any form of negotiation, decide how you can negotiate most effectively.

The information is useful to a non-retained recruiter because it allows them to estimate their cut and to predict the likelihood that the candidate will receive an attractive offer and therefore be worth the effort of getting them hired. Any recruiter who can't give a salary range when asked probably lacks a robust relationship with the hiring decision maker.

Good luck.

The recruiter I talked to is a technical recruiter under the company payroll. Not an external recruiter.

It's a bit simpler then. Do you want to work for a company where a willingness to put one's self at a negotiating disadvantage is a first order evaluation criterion when hiring technical talent?

just ask him, how your currently salary is influencing the decision making process, if your are the candidate or not.

it´s generally your choice who you share this information with. in Europe, people mostly don´t talk about salaries. in the US it´s common to talk about it... don´t know how the "rules" are in Singapore.

> just ask him, how your currently salary is influencing the decision making process, if your are the candidate or not.

I didn't ask him this. But, another recruiter did tell me that it is HR policy that company need to know this before coming up with offer.

> in Europe, people mostly don´t talk about salaries.

Good to know that.

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