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As a counterpoint to "everyone's very firm minimum acceptable comp is the top of your published range", I find that most jobs with a published salary range seem to pay just low enough for me to not want to go through the trouble of applying.

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It certainly does act as a filter. My point was more, this was much less of a thing when ranges weren't published. Many applicants had firm requirements across all the way across the spectrum. Published rates end up grouping towards top of published ranges for each role. Could be caused by something else of course, this isn't necessarily commentary on cause/effect, but it's my observation.

I suppose if you can set the top end of the range to be something that you feel is exorbitant for a senior engineer, to show that you're willing to pay well for good talent. If you come up short, then perhaps you're just not competitive enough and no amount of playing hide and seek with the salary range will help.

You'll need objective criteria as to why you're making a less than top-end offer to someone, and perhaps a contractual way to promise them how they can make it to the top end... then it could work.

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