Tell HN: You can’t hire diverse candidates because you don’t post salary ranges | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: You can’t hire diverse candidates because you don’t post salary ranges

6 pointsheeton3 comments

Following up on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32181619 with my own experience building several teams and working with recruiters over the years.

The single biggest impact I saw to improve the quality and range of candidates: post the salary they will receive.

Every person who is currently being underpaid is now incentivised to apply. Hint: this is WAY more likely among candidates who aren’t 20-30 year old, English speaking white guys.

Even better, drop the range and give a clear, fixed salary for a specific role, no negotiation allowed.

It should be obvious that this is a small part of a big problem, but it’s a quick and easy one to fix and has a serious impact.

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It does not make sense to have a fixed salary decided upfront for a position. Candidates profiles rarely exactly match the job description. You might decide to take a risk on a promising junior candidates or decide for a more experienced candidates that you had in mind at first. Often, you end up also end up adapting the role the new hires to their qualifications which might differ from the original posting requirements.

The goal of a salary negotiation is to find common ground between what would make the prospective employee happy and what the company wants to pay to hire this specific person. If you are not willing to negotiate, you will surely hire even less people because most employment deal is a custom one.

Even if you post a range, you might end up going above or higher. The range is good to showcase what you would pay the hypothetical role and profile described in the job description. Depending on who's applying, there's always room for adjusting it to each specific case.

> Candidates profiles rarely exactly match the job description. You might decide to take a risk on a promising junior candidates or decide for a more experienced candidates that you had in mind at first.

Post multiple jobs then. Post a senior job with a reasonable range, a mid-level job with a reasonable range, etc. Then just don't fill them if you don't need to.

> Often, you end up also end up adapting the role the new hires to their qualifications which might differ from the original posting requirements.

This is extremely rare in practice.

Small/medium companies can't do it because they usually need a specific skill set right now. It might even be their first hire of someone with that skill set.

Large companies usually don't do it because they have adopted more rigid management and HR practices that make it difficult.

Regardless, posting a (let's say) $30k range is not going to bite you if you have to slightly modify a role for someone.

“The goal of a salary negotiation”

You’ve failed at the first hurdle then. This is to remove all negotiation and give candidates some advance assurance of their remuneration.

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