5 ms·

Online Job Posts Contain Little Wage Information [pdf]

35 points by hunglee2 3y ago

mikeytown2 3y ago
One of the reasons why most job spam from recruiters is absolutely garbage, there's no pay ranges listed. I'm already not interested and good luck getting me to dig deep to see what the actual pay range is
- hunglee2 3y ago
  the problem outlined in this research is also that when pay ranges are listed, they diverge from reality.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  I just respond to the recruiter with something like this - that sounds like something I can do however I am currently making X - so I'm not really going to be interested in moving for less than X + Y or some other benefits combination that equals that kind of increase in value. This then generally leads to another message where they say oh we can't and I say hey that's fine, best of luck. Basically for me to consider moving I would need to make at least 1 extra month's worth of money every 6 months, so two extra months per year. on edit: maybe it is different for people in the U.S / Bay area? That is to say maybe there are regulations or just a general cultural thing that means the recruiters here (Denmark) are more straightforward
sokoloff 3y ago
> among the wages that are posted, high wage firms are more opaque, with more and wider ranges That seems about what I'd expect. From the entire universe of job postings, I'd expect jobs at the lower end of the compensation range to have less potential for productivity differences among employees and, therefore, less range in posted compensation. Roles with higher likely productivity variability among employees would be likely to fall into one of two buckets: variability ranging from some middling amount to very high, where firms would try to find those high-performing employees who could perform at the higher end of the range and variability ranging from some middling amount to very low, which roles would tend to have narrow ranges and companies hoping to find adequate employees to fill them and perform at the middling performance.
- theGnuMe 3y ago
  You're not supposed to have a wide wage range for a single job.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    MLB pitcher. NFL quarterback. Movie actor. Book author. Quant trader. Mutual fund analyst. Commodities trader. Salesperson. Lawyer. Head coach. CEO. CTO. IMO, software engineer is also among the jobs where a wide range of performance is evidenced from among the people who are qualified to hold the position.
    - itoto9 3y ago
      Bill Belichick suggests rent seekers propped up by an entire organization is the norm. Good players wanted to play with Brady, not for Belichick. None of those titles exist if the individuals are spending their days growing their food. Capitalism only exists as a socialized meme there’s a communal upside to capitalism. What’s the communal value to propagating Bezos and Belichick types specifically deserve special privileges if they’re so dependent? New idea; if Musk can survive in the wilds of Alaska for a month he can stay rich. Let them prove it’s not just propagation of memes via media that keeps us talking about how great they are.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        > None of those titles exist if the individuals are spending their days growing their food. Cumulative productivity gains from valuable inventions and systems are the reason that we aren't all spending our days growing food to survive. IMO, that's a very, very good thing and society should support those advances to be created.
        itoto9 3y ago
        Your generalization leaves a lot of wiggle room for how society ought to support cumulative gains. Because we have accumulated less need for data entry and content jobs thanks to AI office workers could do more of the real work to provide for their real needs to afford manual labor class time to focus on the abstract. The god father of capitalism, Adam Smith, is said to have written that division of labor taken to the extreme will result in humans dumber than the lowest animal. Kind of feels as if, while we ride career escalators, externalization of all our other work, is fostering a prisoners dilemma society finds itself in as the number of have nots rapidly outpaces the haves. The majority are all “this is all I know, I can’t get off the debt service tread mill.” Put some of the real work of keeping themselves alive on billionaires and they’re too busy to spend all their time propagating their Ponzi schemes.
hhs 3y ago
Please note this is the paper's link: https://www.nber.org/papers/w31984 https://www.nber.org/papers/w31984
wallawe 3y ago
This doesn't make sense from the hiring side to me. I have a small agency with 10 employees and it's just common sense to put salary info in the job listing. Otherwise we both waste each other's time if it's not up to their expectations. What is the benefit of obscuring it until it's time to present an offer?
- oblio 3y ago
  Sunken cost fallacy. Face to face sales tactics. FOMO.
- hunglee2 3y ago
  inconsistent incumbent pay scales is the main limiting factor for publishing pay scale. Basically, there are a lot of employees in a lot of employers that have pay all over the map, due to lack of compensation policy / hiring manager (in)discretion.
- nytesky 3y ago
  Yeah I don’t understand why they are so cagey. I’ve been flown out, stayed at hotels, burned hours of their employees time in interviews, and then get a ridiculous low ball and things grind to a halt. Maybe I have a very punchable face and they think they can get me on the cheap? No idea
bluedino 3y ago
When I see a job posting with no wage information, I assume they are paying 50% of what a similar job pays on the mid-to high end. So for a job that you'd see list at $140-180k, I'm guessing they are looking to pay $60-80k. It just doesn't seem worth the time to craft a cover letter, application, couple hours of interviews...
- giantg2 3y ago
  I wish I saw jobs listed at $140k-180k.
  - apwell23 3y ago
    Netflix lists jobs ranges 200k-800k for their software engineer postings on linkedin.
    - giantg2 3y ago
      That just seems insane to me. I guess I wouldn't be qualified to work for them.
      - _w1tm 3y ago
        Why would you say that? Apply and find out.
        ohthatsnotright 3y ago
        One of the few FAANG/MAGMA companies I've applied to repeatedly and never heard back. I may not be tailoring my experience to match their culture slides correctly.
        hughdbrown 3y ago
        Usual practice is to tailor your resume to match the job posting, emphasizing points of agreement. Is Netflix a special case where you have to look up the company values/culture and amend to match that?
rjtavares 3y ago
A lot of discussion in this thread seems to be ignoring the subjectivity in defining what a job is. Job analysis and design is a fascinating topic and should become more important with "AI" changing the way we work. Unfortunately it's a topic covered mostly by HR consultants (it would benefit greatly from interest from the HN crowd). edit: to avoid confusion, I'm talking about "a job" as "a collection of similar positions", an Job Analysis as a "a family of procedures to identify the content of a job in terms of the activities it involves in addition to the attributes or requirements necessary to perform those activities"
- JeffSnazzy 3y ago
  > A lot of discussion in this thread seems to be ignoring the subjectivity in defining what a job is Wage-based employment is not subjective, it is a formally defined and legally-regulated practice. You can call contract work a "job" but it's not relevant to the topic at hand—wages.
  - rjtavares 3y ago
    That's not what my comment is about. That's a contractual distinction. In the context of HR, a "Job" is a collection of similar positions, an Job Analysis is "a family of procedures to identify the content of a job in terms of the activities it involves in addition to the attributes or requirements necessary to perform those activities". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_analysis
    - JeffSnazzy 3y ago
      > In the context of HR, a "Job" is a collection of similar positions, an Job Analysis is "a family of procedures to identify the content of a job in terms of the activities it involves in addition to the attributes or requirements necessary to perform those activities". Why would you think this is relevant?
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  Companies that don’t have a good picture of what they want or need for an individual role are rarely good places to work for. Generally, this means “we will pile on whatever responsibilities we feel like and without paying you more.”
arwhatever 3y ago
If this means that job postings make for poor wage research data, as the abstract claims, then researchers should use The Work Number! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753 </s>

35 points by hunglee2 3y ago

One of the reasons why most job spam from recruiters is absolutely garbage, there's no pay ranges listed. I'm already not interested and good luck getting me to dig deep to see what the actual pay range is

hunglee2 3y ago
the problem outlined in this research is also that when pay ranges are listed, they diverge from reality.
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
I just respond to the recruiter with something like this - that sounds like something I can do however I am currently making X - so I'm not really going to be interested in moving for less than X + Y or some other benefits combination that equals that kind of increase in value. This then generally leads to another message where they say oh we can't and I say hey that's fine, best of luck. Basically for me to consider moving I would need to make at least 1 extra month's worth of money every 6 months, so two extra months per year. on edit: maybe it is different for people in the U.S / Bay area? That is to say maybe there are regulations or just a general cultural thing that means the recruiters here (Denmark) are more straightforward

sokoloff 3y ago

> among the wages that are posted, high wage firms are more opaque, with more and wider ranges That seems about what I'd expect. From the entire universe of job postings, I'd expect jobs at the lower end of the compensation range to have less potential for productivity differences among employees and, therefore, less range in posted compensation. Roles with higher likely productivity variability among employees would be likely to fall into one of two buckets: variability ranging from some middling amount to very high, where firms would try to find those high-performing employees who could perform at the higher end of the range and variability ranging from some middling amount to very low, which roles would tend to have narrow ranges and companies hoping to find adequate employees to fill them and perform at the middling performance.

theGnuMe 3y ago
You're not supposed to have a wide wage range for a single job.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  MLB pitcher. NFL quarterback. Movie actor. Book author. Quant trader. Mutual fund analyst. Commodities trader. Salesperson. Lawyer. Head coach. CEO. CTO. IMO, software engineer is also among the jobs where a wide range of performance is evidenced from among the people who are qualified to hold the position.
  - itoto9 3y ago
    Bill Belichick suggests rent seekers propped up by an entire organization is the norm. Good players wanted to play with Brady, not for Belichick. None of those titles exist if the individuals are spending their days growing their food. Capitalism only exists as a socialized meme there’s a communal upside to capitalism. What’s the communal value to propagating Bezos and Belichick types specifically deserve special privileges if they’re so dependent? New idea; if Musk can survive in the wilds of Alaska for a month he can stay rich. Let them prove it’s not just propagation of memes via media that keeps us talking about how great they are.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      > None of those titles exist if the individuals are spending their days growing their food. Cumulative productivity gains from valuable inventions and systems are the reason that we aren't all spending our days growing food to survive. IMO, that's a very, very good thing and society should support those advances to be created.
      - itoto9 3y ago
        Your generalization leaves a lot of wiggle room for how society ought to support cumulative gains. Because we have accumulated less need for data entry and content jobs thanks to AI office workers could do more of the real work to provide for their real needs to afford manual labor class time to focus on the abstract. The god father of capitalism, Adam Smith, is said to have written that division of labor taken to the extreme will result in humans dumber than the lowest animal. Kind of feels as if, while we ride career escalators, externalization of all our other work, is fostering a prisoners dilemma society finds itself in as the number of have nots rapidly outpaces the haves. The majority are all “this is all I know, I can’t get off the debt service tread mill.” Put some of the real work of keeping themselves alive on billionaires and they’re too busy to spend all their time propagating their Ponzi schemes.

hhs 3y ago

Please note this is the paper's link: https://www.nber.org/papers/w31984 https://www.nber.org/papers/w31984

wallawe 3y ago

This doesn't make sense from the hiring side to me. I have a small agency with 10 employees and it's just common sense to put salary info in the job listing. Otherwise we both waste each other's time if it's not up to their expectations. What is the benefit of obscuring it until it's time to present an offer?

oblio 3y ago
Sunken cost fallacy. Face to face sales tactics. FOMO.
hunglee2 3y ago
inconsistent incumbent pay scales is the main limiting factor for publishing pay scale. Basically, there are a lot of employees in a lot of employers that have pay all over the map, due to lack of compensation policy / hiring manager (in)discretion.
nytesky 3y ago
Yeah I don’t understand why they are so cagey. I’ve been flown out, stayed at hotels, burned hours of their employees time in interviews, and then get a ridiculous low ball and things grind to a halt. Maybe I have a very punchable face and they think they can get me on the cheap? No idea

bluedino 3y ago

When I see a job posting with no wage information, I assume they are paying 50% of what a similar job pays on the mid-to high end. So for a job that you'd see list at $140-180k, I'm guessing they are looking to pay $60-80k. It just doesn't seem worth the time to craft a cover letter, application, couple hours of interviews...

giantg2 3y ago
I wish I saw jobs listed at $140k-180k.
- apwell23 3y ago
  Netflix lists jobs ranges 200k-800k for their software engineer postings on linkedin.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    That just seems insane to me. I guess I wouldn't be qualified to work for them.
    - _w1tm 3y ago
      Why would you say that? Apply and find out.
      - ohthatsnotright 3y ago
        One of the few FAANG/MAGMA companies I've applied to repeatedly and never heard back. I may not be tailoring my experience to match their culture slides correctly.
        hughdbrown 3y ago
        Usual practice is to tailor your resume to match the job posting, emphasizing points of agreement. Is Netflix a special case where you have to look up the company values/culture and amend to match that?

rjtavares 3y ago

A lot of discussion in this thread seems to be ignoring the subjectivity in defining what a job is. Job analysis and design is a fascinating topic and should become more important with "AI" changing the way we work. Unfortunately it's a topic covered mostly by HR consultants (it would benefit greatly from interest from the HN crowd). edit: to avoid confusion, I'm talking about "a job" as "a collection of similar positions", an Job Analysis as a "a family of procedures to identify the content of a job in terms of the activities it involves in addition to the attributes or requirements necessary to perform those activities"

JeffSnazzy 3y ago
> A lot of discussion in this thread seems to be ignoring the subjectivity in defining what a job is Wage-based employment is not subjective, it is a formally defined and legally-regulated practice. You can call contract work a "job" but it's not relevant to the topic at hand—wages.
- rjtavares 3y ago
  That's not what my comment is about. That's a contractual distinction. In the context of HR, a "Job" is a collection of similar positions, an Job Analysis is "a family of procedures to identify the content of a job in terms of the activities it involves in addition to the attributes or requirements necessary to perform those activities". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_analysis
  - JeffSnazzy 3y ago
    > In the context of HR, a "Job" is a collection of similar positions, an Job Analysis is "a family of procedures to identify the content of a job in terms of the activities it involves in addition to the attributes or requirements necessary to perform those activities". Why would you think this is relevant?
bugglebeetle 3y ago
Companies that don’t have a good picture of what they want or need for an individual role are rarely good places to work for. Generally, this means “we will pile on whatever responsibilities we feel like and without paying you more.”

arwhatever 3y ago

If this means that job postings make for poor wage research data, as the abstract claims, then researchers should use The Work Number! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753 </s>