The Talent Labs

By Clive Smart, Head of Talent Acquisition

In the UK it’s not common practice to advertise salary details on a job advert, the one piece of information a job seeker really wants to see is often hidden. We all want candidates to opt in at the start of the process, not opt out later when they find out what the job pays. So why have we got ourselves into this position where we are not allowed to disclose up front the most important piece of information a job seeker wants to see?

Other parts of the world have legislation in place where it is illegal not to advertise the salary.
So how do you move to salary transparency on job adverts? These are my top tips to follow, this is how I did it when I worked at Sky Betting & Gaming.

Review internal data

Start off by getting access to salary data for every job family in your business. Then overlay salary banding data to identify if you have anyone below the start of the band for all your job families. Anyone below the band needs to be addressed before you start advertising salaries on your job adverts. Think how that colleague would feel if they saw their own job advertised on the careers site and they are not even paid at start of the salary band!

Benchmarking tools & data

You need to have access to benchmarking information and having salary bandings for each job family in your business, the Talent Acquisition team needs access to this data. When new roles or backfills are created you need to use the salary banding information. Have permission to use the full salary banding if you need it, finance teams have their own ideas and budgets to hit but you need to get them on-board to this new approach.

Internal sponsors & sign-off

You’re going to need to get sign-off to launch this (often a business case to your Leadership team); plus, I’d recommend having several internal sponsors to support you too. You’re probably going to get
a lot of push-back that advertising salaries will give away information to your competitors, but your competitors already know what you pay so don’t have that as a reason not to do this. Actually advertising the salary puts you in a competitive advantage and candidates really love transparency.

Avoid own-goals!

So, you have sign off to go live, but you probably
still have a number of internal people who now need a salary uplift (that may take a while and not be cheap) till those are addressed any of those jobs cannot be advertised with a salary banding. Let’s hope it’s not one of your key roles that you recruit in numbers that you can not advertise the salary on.

Start small, then scale

Select a handful of roles to go live with, decide if your editing live job requisitions or only starting when a new role goes live. Once you have tested and unearthed any problems look to scale. Entry level roles (e.g., Contact Centre Advisor) and Early Careers can often be roles to test this out on.

Communication

Don’t forget to communicate to your hiring manager community what you are up to, they are bound
to have an opinion on this. However, you may be surprised how many supporters you pick up.

Don’t create future problems

Internal promotions can easily undo all your hard work, make sure all internal promotions move to at least the start of the salary band for the job they are moving into.

Download the Attraction & Sourcing Insight Report here.