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Show them the money!!

by Brett Iredale July 15, 2008



In today's job market it is vital to list salary details on your job ads whenever humanly possible.

With the number of job ads currently listed on job boards it is imperitive to list salary details on your job ads so that candidates can more effectively determine if your position is suitable or not.  Salary is easily one of the most important criteria that candidates use to decide if a position is of interest to them. 

An analogy I find interesting is that of property.  My wife and I have been looking for a house to buy or rent for the last few months and to assist us in our searching we have been registering for alert emails on all the major real estate sites.  One of the things I found interesting is that after about a day of looking I stopped clicking on houses that didn't have a price listed.  Even if the houses were in the right suburb and had the right ticks in boxes I found it too frustrating to then have to phone real estate agents, leave messages, never hear back etc etc.  So in the end I used listing price as the key criteria in determining if a property was worth even clicking on let alone visiting.

Job searching is the same.  Job seekers have hundreds of thousands of potential vacancies to look through so why would they go to the trouble of clicking on your job if they don't know what the salary range is?

I know all the reasons why recruiters and corporates sometimes don't like advertising salaries but on the balance of things you are always going to be better off listing a salary.  Job boards like SEEK and MyCareer know how job seekers behave and have been encouraging us all to list salary details for years.  If you are not doing it yet then think about starting today.


Entry filed under: General, Tips and Tricks

3 CommentsAdd your own

1. Craig July 15, 2008 at 11:17am

There is only one reason why advertisers would not list the salary, to get contact from people who are outside the salary range for the job. They can then get this person on their books and try and talk them round to taking the salary offered, even if it is much lower than they are after. There is also the added bonus that if the person is after less than what the job would pay they would receive an extra commission. From a job seekers position this is very much sales shark type behaviour and leads to mistrust.

2. Brett Iredale July 15, 2008 at 12:02pm

There are occasions where a client will insist that the salary is not listed so that other employees can't compare it to their own salaries. However I still believe that a bit of guidance and explanation can usually find a way around this.

3. Carey Eaton July 16, 2008 at 8:45am

Provision of salary data has always been a bit of a taboo subject in the industry but I think we're going to see a bit of movement on it this year.

There's always been a strong tension between the desire of jobseekers to know salary information about an an advertised job, and the often genuine need for advertisers to maintain salary confidentiality.

To meet these different needs, SEEK recently changed how we manage salary data, allowing advertisers to post two sets of salary information not one.

The first can be entirely hidden from jobseekers and put in very broad ranges and is only used by our search engine - its impossible for a jobseeker to precisely identify a salary from this field.

The second is a free text field where an advertiser can put any remuneration and packaging salary information they wish including words.

Using the various combinations of these fields and the ability to 'hide' tha salary range, advertisers can make sure their job is found by relevant candidates while maintaining confidentiality.

A number of advertisers have now changed their policies about the provision of salary data to SEEK. I think it is only a matter of time before we are able to communicate to the market that those advertisers using the confidential salary functionality are getting better performance both in terms of quantity and quality of application.

Fairfax's Trade Me job site in New Zealand and Australia's RealEstate have already made the provision of salary/ pricing information mandatory for all of their advertisers with no negative impact to their market share or ad performance.

While SEEK has no plans to force advertisers to provide salary information, I am reasonably confident that the market itself is going to push towards that end as it becomes clear that providing a 'hidden' range to our search engine delivers both measurable results.

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