A massive pet peeve of mine is when I see roles that don’t advertise their salary clearly; and I’m aware they are plenty of others out there who share my annoyance. So why aren’t we as employers better about being open about pay?
I think ‘growing up’ in the civil service spoiled me when it comes to salaries, I always knew what grade a job was and what pay-scale that grade came with. When looking for new roles I could easily find out whether the pay-scale in a different department was higher or lower than my current home department, and there was never a need to have any awkward salary conversations as it was all out in the open.
While their were still some awkward gender pay disparity in parts of the civil service, for the most part it didn’t seem like much of an issue (*to me) as everyone working within the same role was generally on the same pay scale, and the slight differences in pay was usually about their length of time in role etc.
Interestingly when I became a Deputy Director and was involved more in recruitment and job offers I saw how complex the issue of salaries could be. While it was relatively easy to benchmark salaries against other departments; and competing with the private sector was never really going to happen; one thing I did spot was the difference in how we treated external vs. internal hires.
While internal promotions went automatically to the bottom of the pay band, external hires could negotiate higher salaries, this was based on the historic view that the private sector paid more so we had to be willing to offer them more money to join the civil service. This obviously did not give parity to people and suggested we prioritised external experience over internal experience. Given that government was forging the path of user centric design and product management; and being recognised around the world as the expert in digital innovation (at least in terms of service design and UCD etc.); it felt ridiculous to me that we weren’t being seen to value that internal expertise when it came to salary.
Thankfully I was able to get HR to agree to trial equal pay flexibility to internal and external hires; so that I could negotiate pay equally with all candidates no much what industry they came from, and base pay decisions solely on their experience and performance during recruitment. This seemed to work really well; our staff satisfaction went up when it came to the staff survey questions about pay and remuneration (almost unheard of) and it decreased the trend of civil servants constantly leaving for the private sector.
I did however notice quickly that male presenting candidates were far more comfortable negotiating than female presenting ones. To combat this when I prepared to offer anyone a role I had a small table that I’d prepared and agreed with HR that showed the candidates score and where that put them in terms of the salary scale we had for the role. This meant if the candidate wasn’t comfortable talking about salary, I could pitch them at the level I thought fair to ensure we were still giving parity to all hires.
Moving to the ‘private’ sector I now try to keep an eye one competitors salaries etc. to ensure I’m still offering a fair salary when hiring; but it’s actually really hard. It’s nigh on impossible to see salaries for other organisations without spending a lot of time doing detective work. Glassdoor and linkedIn both try to show average salaries for job roles via role titles; but there’s so much variety in job roles/ titles and responsibilities that it’s almost impossible to ensure parity.
Lots of companies don’t publicise the salary on their job adverts, and instead want candidates to apply and then discuss salary expectations as part of the early recruitment process. There’s lots of conversations out there on /AskAManager, LinkedIn etc. with people asking for advice on how and when they should bring up salary in the recruitment process. We shouldn’t be making it this hard for people to get a fair wage. There was a thread on twitter last week that highlighted how hard many women find it to know what salary they should be asking for when negotiating pay. This cloud of secrecy is shown to make wage parity/ discrimination higher. Women of colour in particular are shown to be hardest hit by the pay gap.
Theres plenty of studies out there that show that by not talking about salaries openly we are widening the pay gap, and it’s not just hurting our drive for equality, it’s hitting productivity too. Elena Belogolovsky stated in a study for Journal of Business and Psychology: “If I don’t know my co-worker’s pay, I assume that I might not be getting paid as much, and I decrease my performance. When people don’t know each other’s pay, they assume they are underpaid.”
So as an employer what can we do to improve pay transparency and parity?
- Publicise the salary on all your job adverts. Ideally publicise a pay band to show the scale available to all candidates. Hell if you want a gold star, publicise your pay scales on your company website, whether you’re hiring or not; and publicise it again on all your job adverts.
- When you’re offering a candidate a role, don’t wait for the candidate to bring up salary, and don’t only negotiate if the candidate asks to; proactively discuss with them what salary you believe is fair and why.
- If you’re hiring multiple roles, keep track of what salary you have offered to each candidate and ensure all offers are fair and in line with people’s experience. I have previously gone back to a candidate who had accepted a role to offer them a slightly higher salary once I completed a recruitment campaign when I reviewed all the offers and felt based on experience they deserved more than initially agreed. The candidate was astonished as she’d never had anyone feedback to her before that she was worth more than the minimum.
We all need to do better to ensure pay parity. We need to be open about pay and be willing to talk about salaries and what ‘good’ and ‘equal’ looks like.
