Interviews and Money

When I was growing up, I was told never to discuss money in an interview until an offer had been made. It was considered gauche to do otherwise. Now, it seems, every company asks what your salary expectations are before you even get an interview … and the faceless baboons won’t take no for an answer!

Curious as to why this attitude changed, I once asked some HR drone why he would do something so arbitrary. His explanation baffled me. “We get a lot of CVs”, he said.” It’s a way of eliminating people who don’t fit what we’re willing to pay. It cuts down on the time spent interviewing people only to find out that they want too much money.” Excuse me?! They expect me to go through the extensive process of registering on their Byzantine websites and preparing a suitable CV and cover letter! Why should I waste MY valuable time if I’m just going to be eliminated by some penny pinching HR simian that can’t see beyond an arbitrary number?

Did it ever occur to these banana brains that the applicants may accept a lower wage than they might otherwise if there are compensating factors? How close does one have to come to guessing the correct value before getting eliminated? Aren’t these companies interested in hiring the best person for the job or do all they care about is money? It certainly gives one pause to stop and think whether one really wants to get involved with such a company.

I suggest that businesses publish the salary range that they are offering with the job. This would allow me as an applicant to decide whether I would be comfortable with the salary. It would also eliminate the time I would otherwise waste applying for a job as well as unnecessary email traffic and the time it would take the HR hobbit to chuck my application in the round file.

Now, the hobbits wrinkle their foreheads in deep thought and say, “We don’t want someone taking a job at a lower wage just to have a job until something better comes along”. Excuse me? Don’t people jump companies in both good times and bad times? It seems to me that companies that offer too little compensation will get what they pay for. Sometimes that may be good enough, I suppose, but some companies have a policy of paying the top wage, some at ¾ of the industry average and so on. Every company is different. If I don’t know the scale, how can I expect to accurately set a viable current market wage for myself at any particular company? For example, when a house is put on the market, we have to figure out what all the other ones are selling for and price ours accordingly. We have MLS listings to help with that. With companies that don’t publish their wage structure, however, there is no way to compare them. So it’s only fair for companies to publish the wage range along with the job listing. After all, governments do this so why not publicly-owned companies, too? As a shareholder or potential shareholder, should I not have access to this information to be able to judge how well the company is protecting my future? It’s not like it’s an invasion of privacy. It just puts the onus of accepting the salary range on the applicant right from the beginning and would make everyone’s life easier.

It makes me wonder what good HR people are these days. They certainly don’t have any technical expertise to judge the value of an applicant. They’re like those word-search puzzles one finds in magazines no one reads. If you don’t have all the right words, they use an axe in the shape of a $ or something equally as metaphorically meaningless to whittle down the intruders in their email-bound lives. I shudder to think who gets an interview nowadays when job seekers are subject to such ignorance, incompetence and arbitrariness. In these economically difficult times, do yourselves and us a favour and publish the salary range.