<story><title>Ask HN: Are you more likely to apply for a job that discloses salary upfront?</title><text>I started to work on a job board to improve my Node.js &amp;#x2F; MongoDB skills and I&amp;#x27;m thinking of actually launching it. But how do I make my board different from all others? I&amp;#x27;m thinking of having a mandatory salary field so that each job would contain a salary range.&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow data shows that job ads with salary receive 75% more clicks. https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;stackoverflow.blog&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;salary-transparency&amp;#x2F;#75. Other job sites are reporting 20% - 30% increase in job applications for ads with salaries.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>finspin</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m thinking that launching just another job board won&amp;#x27;t get me anywhere. I&amp;#x27;ll have to either a) spend heavily on advertising (which I can&amp;#x27;t afford) or b) differentiate myself from all other job boards out there.&lt;p&gt;I live in Finland (5 million habitants) and based on my research only about 5% of job ads include salary. It&amp;#x27;s not part of the culture to discuss salaries publicly so it&amp;#x27;s very well possible that companies won&amp;#x27;t be willing to go public.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I think it&amp;#x27;s quite promising that there are even a few companies that are already publishing their salary offers, despite most of the competition not doing it.&lt;p&gt;I see it as my job to convince them it&amp;#x27;s good for their business and start a little revolution. Maybe others will join the bandwagon?</text></item><item><author>jawns</author><text>I doubt you&amp;#x27;ll get anyone who says that salary range disclosed in a job advertisement is not a good thing, from the perspective of the job seeker.&lt;p&gt;The question you may want to ask instead is: &amp;quot;Does the benefit to the job seeker of having a salary range specified outweigh the loss of potential advertisers who do not want to disclose a salary range?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re just doing this as a side project, with no expectation of making a business out of it, then you may want to lean more toward what benefits the user.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re trying to run a business and pay the bills, you might need to think more about how it decreases your potential revenue, assuming the job advertisers are the ones who are paying for your service.&lt;p&gt;One other thing: Salary range is inherently a fuzzy concept.  It&amp;#x27;s possible to set limits (e.g. the range must not span more than $20K, or the range must not constitute more than 20% of the lower-end number) but then you have to take into account that an advertised salary range is not necessarily the same as what they&amp;#x27;re ultimately willing to offer you.  And then you have to factor in benefits, etc., which can make salary ranges misleading.&lt;p&gt;Edit: One possible way to make salary range disclosures more palatable to advertisers is to borrow a strategy from matchmaking systems: The advertiser discloses a salary range, and the job seeker discloses a minimum required salary, to the website, which does not make any of that information public.  When the job seeker submits an application for a job, they receive a notice if the advertiser&amp;#x27;s specified salary range does not meet their minimum requirements.  This keeps the actual salary range out of public view and at least slightly difficult to estimate, but it prevents the job applicant from wasting their time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>The grandparent post is making an important point though: consider carefully which side of the market makes the rules and embrace &lt;i&gt;their&lt;/i&gt; rules as constraints.&lt;p&gt;I spent ~8 months working on two different startup ideas in the hiring space, one with a cofounder who&amp;#x27;d been researching it for close to a year before I came along.  We also started with grand ideas of making hiring easier for the jobseeker.  The problem is that jobseekers do not have money - hence why they need a job - and so all the money in the hiring space comes from the employer.  Like any other competitive market, hiring is subject to the Golden Rule: &amp;quot;He who has the gold makes the rules.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why getting a job sucks so much.  It&amp;#x27;s a process that&amp;#x27;s entirely designed to benefit the company offering the job, not the person seeking the job.  And lest you think you can just force companies to make their hiring processes more employee-friendly (we did), consider what happens if they say no.  You&amp;#x27;ll have no listings, and without any listings, you have nothing to offer the jobseeker.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Are you more likely to apply for a job that discloses salary upfront?</title><text>I started to work on a job board to improve my Node.js &amp;#x2F; MongoDB skills and I&amp;#x27;m thinking of actually launching it. But how do I make my board different from all others? I&amp;#x27;m thinking of having a mandatory salary field so that each job would contain a salary range.&lt;p&gt;Stack Overflow data shows that job ads with salary receive 75% more clicks. https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;stackoverflow.blog&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;salary-transparency&amp;#x2F;#75. Other job sites are reporting 20% - 30% increase in job applications for ads with salaries.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>finspin</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m thinking that launching just another job board won&amp;#x27;t get me anywhere. I&amp;#x27;ll have to either a) spend heavily on advertising (which I can&amp;#x27;t afford) or b) differentiate myself from all other job boards out there.&lt;p&gt;I live in Finland (5 million habitants) and based on my research only about 5% of job ads include salary. It&amp;#x27;s not part of the culture to discuss salaries publicly so it&amp;#x27;s very well possible that companies won&amp;#x27;t be willing to go public.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I think it&amp;#x27;s quite promising that there are even a few companies that are already publishing their salary offers, despite most of the competition not doing it.&lt;p&gt;I see it as my job to convince them it&amp;#x27;s good for their business and start a little revolution. Maybe others will join the bandwagon?</text></item><item><author>jawns</author><text>I doubt you&amp;#x27;ll get anyone who says that salary range disclosed in a job advertisement is not a good thing, from the perspective of the job seeker.&lt;p&gt;The question you may want to ask instead is: &amp;quot;Does the benefit to the job seeker of having a salary range specified outweigh the loss of potential advertisers who do not want to disclose a salary range?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re just doing this as a side project, with no expectation of making a business out of it, then you may want to lean more toward what benefits the user.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re trying to run a business and pay the bills, you might need to think more about how it decreases your potential revenue, assuming the job advertisers are the ones who are paying for your service.&lt;p&gt;One other thing: Salary range is inherently a fuzzy concept.  It&amp;#x27;s possible to set limits (e.g. the range must not span more than $20K, or the range must not constitute more than 20% of the lower-end number) but then you have to take into account that an advertised salary range is not necessarily the same as what they&amp;#x27;re ultimately willing to offer you.  And then you have to factor in benefits, etc., which can make salary ranges misleading.&lt;p&gt;Edit: One possible way to make salary range disclosures more palatable to advertisers is to borrow a strategy from matchmaking systems: The advertiser discloses a salary range, and the job seeker discloses a minimum required salary, to the website, which does not make any of that information public.  When the job seeker submits an application for a job, they receive a notice if the advertiser&amp;#x27;s specified salary range does not meet their minimum requirements.  This keeps the actual salary range out of public view and at least slightly difficult to estimate, but it prevents the job applicant from wasting their time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kej</author><text>I feel like the job board (yours, Monster, Dice, whoever) is in a unique position to solve this problem. You can ask each side for their salary range but then don&amp;#x27;t disclose it to the opposite side. You can then match candidates to compatible jobs and everyone knows up front that the desired ranges overlap.</text></comment>