Your Salary History Is Nobody's Business But Yours

Some recruiters and some HR people will tell you that they simply must have your salary history!

That’s a lie, of course. All they really need is your salary target. What they should do is post the salary range in the job ad. That would solve the whole problem!

Ask yourself: why don’t employers post the salary range in the job ad? It’s because they want to hedge their bets. They might have $60K in the budget, but hey, if you stroll into the place and you’re amazing and you were only earning $48K at your last job, you might get the job!

You might get the job offer at $50K. They figure you’ll be happy, because you got a raise.

You’d never know that they had budgeted ten thousand dollars more.

It happened to me. I will be forever grateful to my old boss John for hiring me and giving me a fantastic opportunity, but let it also be said that when I was organizing files one day, I found the file that contained the correspondence between John and the headhunter he had hired to find a new HR Manager.

I got that job through a connection, not a headhunter, so John saved a search fee. In the correspondence he told the headhunter that he’d be willing to pay someone $50K to become the company’s HR manager.

I took the job at $40K plus a $5K bonus opportunity. What did I know? It was 1988, and I was 28 years old. With the bonus potential it was a good pay increase for me, so I wasn’t complaining. Was it ethical for John to pay me so much less than what he had budgeted?  I don’t care about that. Like I said, it was a fantastic job and I certainly never felt underpaid. We consider this kind of thing good business.

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Source: Forbes.com