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Comment by rajacombinator | Hacker News Reader

Salary range. Critical info that most job listings don’t have. I’m much more likely to consider a job if I know it has an appropriate salary range.

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Can't upvote this enough. Even if it's a really wide range, it rules out companies with unrealistically low pay scales.

It also makes it slightly more equitable, since employees are no longer reliant on playing salary poker in order to determine their pay rate. This tends to reduce the salary gap.

Hence why companies rarely include it.

That’s silly and bad strategy though, hoping you can “trick” someone into taking a lower salary by getting them to the end of an interview process. Just biases your pool for the least valuable candidates.

In general trying to underpay any employee is a dumb strategy and I don't understand why it's so universal. If you pay any in-demand role under market, you're providing them with a strong incentive to move elsewhere right out of the gate.

There's not a lot of standardized titles and salaries in our profession. One company's idea of a "Senior Engineer" might be wildly different than another's. Either what level of experience that actually is, or how many hours/week you have to work, or not-salary things like 401k matching or bonus ranges, extensive travel requirements, etc.

I don't like the negotiation game either, but I don't really see how to avoid it.

I don't negotiate. I know my market rate. I say I want X and they either pay me X or I don't accept the offer.

I don't count bonuses as part of compensation when I am considering jobs. I've been burned too often by the promises of a bonus.

I also discount 401K matches that don't immediately vest. The longer they take to vest, the less I count them.

I also don't negotiate for raises. Either they keep up with market rates or I look for another job.

One of the main reasons I always go through recruiters. They won't waste my time or theirs submitting me to jobs where the salary is not what I want.

*good recruiters

Have any tips on finding good recruiters to work with? Most of the people that reach out to me are clearly not giving a level of care to their search that I'd be comfortable working with (for instance, I was a PHP dev with some JS for a while and would frequently get requests about Java positions). I'd love to work with a recruiter that cares specifically about placing me somewhere good, but I've never met a recruiter like that.

I had great results with this company http://www.bincsearch.com/

They don't need to know anything really. Their role is only lead generation. All they really have to do is a keyword search.

The problem is we are interested in lots of different levels, if you put a typical range you wont get the best people. If you put a high number out you get every nutter in town applying. As a result we dont publish a range.

Could you show the range and then right before someone submits a resume they have to answer 1 or 2 questions. Like -really- basic stuff would weed out a lot of the bots and "I use computers, I can do it!" people. Just needs to be something that takes like 5 minutes or less.

Just me but I'd rather know salary up front and not spend an entire interview just to be low-balled. Wastes everyone's time.

Yep that is what the internal recruiters are for. We have something like pay depending on experience, You should talk to them and they'll discuss. Definitely you should know what is possible before interviewing.

Why can't you publish multiple salary ranges per job post (level 1: $X1 - $Y1, level 2: $X2 - $Y2, etc) or multiple job posts (one for each level)?

Neglecting to publish a salary range seems more like a negotiation tactic on behalf of companies of not wanting to be the first to name a number. Either that or you know your company can't compete on salary, which is my typical assumption when it's a company I've never heard of and I don't see a range provided.

Glassdoor is a good start to get an idea of the salaries.

A lot of smaller companies don't have info. Or the info may be outdated.

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