Whenever I suggest that it’s not optional to list salary ranges on job postings, I always get pushback from someone in the room. Sometimes it’s silent, but often out loud they’ll tell me: “Well, we just don’t do that.” I always follow it up with the same question: Would you ever take a job without knowing how much money you made?

I’ve only had 1 person ever raise their hand when I asked that question and I tend to believe they didn’t understand what I was saying. No one can take a job without knowing how much money they will make. Well, maybe not the children of billionaires or something. But most of us need to know how much money is coming in and if it will cover the money going out.

Continuing to operate assuming people don’t need salary information before applying is just silly, especially as we watch more legislation sweep across the country. It’s time to catch up with the times and start posting those salary ranges before your local laws require it.

2024 Salary Transparency Update

In the last five years, both New York and California have created salary transparency laws alongside a handful of others. If you know anything about HR, you know that when laws pass in both New York and California, it’s likely coming to your state next. The states took two different approaches to transparency.

In New York, they passed the Salary History Ban in 2019. This made it illegal for employers to ask about an applicant’s salary history during the hiring process. I love this legislation because it directly help people get better pay by protecting them from having to disclose a number that creates a ceiling for their compensation. Additionally, New York’s salary transparency laws have been evolving to include more comprehensive reporting requirements for employers, ensuring that salary ranges are not only communicated during recruitment but also within the organization.

Meanwhile, California passed Senate Bill 973. This legislation requires private employers with 100 or more employees to submit an annual pay data report to the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH). The report must include information on employees’ race, ethnicity, and gender, along with salary and hours worked. By collecting and analyzing this data, the state aims to identify and rectify any disparities in compensation based on gender and ethnicity. Bless the comp analysts it’s going to take to figure this out.

Looking ahead to 2024, about 30 states have some kind of law on the books to refine reporting requirements, create transparency around salary ranges, address wage gaps, and attempt to create more equal pay across diverse demographics. While that’s good, it’s a little disappointing to me that it took government regulation. Note: I did not say surprised…

Salary Ranges Gone Wrong (And What To Do Better)

Those laws also open doors for people to sue you based on what you do or don’t disclose. Recently, the problem has been with those salary ranges. On that topic, from my lawyer friend Heather Bussing:

Well, that didn’t take long. Washington’s pay transparency law went into effect January 1, 2023 and ten months later we have class action lawsuits filed for failure to post realistic pay ranges in job ads. Ten months may seem like a long time, but in order to file suit, the employees have to show “the employer committed a pattern of violations as to the employee or committed a violation through application of a formal or informal employer policy or practice.”

In Washington, employees can recover statutory damages of $5,000 each whether or not they suffer actual damages. If the class is approved that can add up. And employees can recover attorneys’ fees as well. So, the incentives to bring these lawsuits are there and it will be interesting to see how they play out. In the meantime, save yourself a lot of hassle, legal fees, and penalties and just post the pay.

Read the whole post here.

Salary Ranges That Work

But what is the right way to post a pay range? I like the idea of pay transparency, but making a reasonable range that’s aligned with the variability in skills within one pay range isn’t always easy without a strong compensation team that has already created rigor around leveling and compensation ranges. I realize we’re not all existing in the best case scenario so I’ll focus more on the literal how to post.

You’re going to share the bottom to the mid range of the salary posting. To be clear, those numbers really should be no more than maybe 10% apart. Remember, that gets to be a really big number the bigger the salary is.

Then beneath that list, you’re going to say, “Additional compensation available for (list variables here like location or really specific experiences they must have).”

So something like this:

$55,000 – $75,000 

Additional compensation available for candidates based in NYC, LA, or San Francisco. Also applicable for a candidate currently working at a retail company where you held this role and met the following benchmarks:…

By listing those additional experiences, we can start paying our best talent instead of paying the best negotiators simply because they asked for more.

Get Over It: Salary Transparency Is Here To Stay

Moral of the story? Salary transparency isn’t going anywhere. You can’t just avoid hiring people in those states anymore. I’d guess some of these elements will become federal law. Get your compensation in line now. Audit your jobs, especially high volume hiring, and make sure there’s equitable pay across the board. Soon enough, you’re going to have to disclose and big gaps will cause some big problems for employers that try to ignore conversation about equitable pay.

Job Postings pay transparency