Stating only percentiles sounds even worse to me for two reasons: Someone will always be paying in the first percentile, but you can't possibly advertise with

Stating only percentiles sounds even worse to me for two reasons: Someone will always be paying in the first percentile, but you can't possibly advertise with that. A really well-paying job (say, CEO of Mozilla) might be a perfectly fine salary but if literally everyone else pays even more insane amounts then it sounds like the job is not worth even glancing at. By having to say the percentile, you can make any amount of compensation sound ridiculous and cannot offer a job whenever you don't have the budget to pay higher than average salaries Perhaps even more importantly: if there were a clear market salary range, people would just look that up and ask for that compensation. As it is, people often get paid twice as much for the same job within one company because they simply don't know of each other's compensation. Across companies this becomes virtually impossible to accurately say. I can only imagine this leading to companies making up favorable numbers and nobody would truly be able to say it's below market pricing when the job ad says it's at the 80th percentile