Do Not Disclose Your Salary to Recruiters

Previous discussion on same article with interesting comments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9481487" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9481487</a>

As stated in the article, it&#x27;s best to ask them for <i>their</i> budget. If I have any interest at all I clearly state these two things on first contact with a recruiter:<p>1. I don&#x27;t discuss my current or past compensation.<p>2. Before I engage at all, I need to know what the baseline salary and compensation package is for the role in question.<p>If they&#x27;re coming to you, you have 100% of the negotiation leverage.

Recruiters are often paid x% of one year&#x27;s base salary. In this case, your interests are aligned with the interest of the recruiter.<p>In my experience, recruiters are &#x27;box checkers&#x27;. They have little to no knowledge of your skill set or the skills required for the job outside of buzz words that can be printed on a resume. The reason recruiters ask for your salary is not to engage in price fixing but to ensure that they pursue a placement where 1) the candidate is getting a pay bump and 2) the candidate is priced competitively.

Ignoring the recruiter problem for a second, should I ever feel obligated to disclose salary information? I have had potential employers straight up ask me what my current salary is, should I just tell them I&#x27;m not going to answer that question?

This is useful advice. I&#x27;m in Canada and thinking (and trying!) about moving to states in very near future. honestly it&#x27;s been challenging dealing with this.<p>Here are few conversations (from what I remember):<p>Amazon Recruiter: So how much are you making right now?<p>Me: I&#x27;m in Canada and I&#x27;m interviewing for a position in NYC, how&#x27;s that relevant. In my Province, we&#x27;ve a central database with salary stats. If you&#x27;ve something similar, I can use that to come up with a number backed by data.<p>Amazon Recruiter: I&#x27;ll get back with that info (he never did!)<p>Generic Recruiter: How much in CAD dollars you make right now?<p>(Me thinking: Do you&#x27;ve any idea about conversion rate? If so, you&#x27;d not be asking this)<p>Me: Sorry I can&#x27;t provide that information.<p>Recruiter: Just so you know when you work with US recruiters, this is a standard requirement that you must provide your current salary for us to be able to proceed.<p>Me: Thanks, I think I&#x27;ll have to find someone else (and we ended there).<p>Based on news articles it seems it is difficult for tech companies to find good people but it is equally difficult for individuals to weed out these recruiters trickery from my experience.<p>Glad to see that asking for salary is not &#x27;standard&#x27; requirement!

This is definitely a hard lesson to learn for many. Recruiters often cite that it&#x27;s a routine question. But just because it is, doesn&#x27;t mean you should answer it.<p>I&#x27;ve seen some recruiters straight up refuse to work with me when I wouldn&#x27;t disclose my current salary. Very glad they did.

Did this thread get flagged or something? It was just on the homepage and now don&#x27;t see it.

Ask yourself how much of a salary increase would I like to see, then add that to your current salary and say that sum when asked. The recruiter knows you are not going to take a salary that is below what you currently make, so they will have to offer you a good salary or give the job to somebody else.<p>Also go read &quot;A Strategy of Conflict&quot;, which will enable you to understand and analyze all sorts of negotiations.

Seriously, read this post, listen to this post. I am a terrible negotiator (as in I have taken pay cuts because jobs seemed interesting and paid sticker price for cars) and hate it like 95% of the rest of software engineers but it&#x27;s how the game is played and we&#x27;re both ourselves individually and ourselves as a group a disservice by not protecting this information.

When you know you&#x27;re above market, it&#x27;s not unreasonable to disclose, knowing they&#x27;ll go to your old employer and verify you are the &quot;real&quot; deal.<p>There&#x27;s little that&#x27;s a more powerful statement of your value to your prior employer as the salary you&#x27;d previously negotiated.

This is a tough one, because you don&#x27;t want to waste your time on jobs that wont pay you what you&#x27;re worth, so stating that you make X and need X + .2X is a good way of weeding out the crap. The author does sort of advise this with the notion of giving a salary requirement, but I&#x27;ve had friends who&#x27;ve used this term and companies have ignored it, thinking they are bluffing. Also, I do see how you could short change yourself if their actual budget was higher when you state your salary or salary requirement. I&#x27;ve found the best thing to do is to apply to multiple places and see what kind of offers you get (and then to pit those offers against each other).

The ideal is not to say nothing, but to know what you&#x27;re worth and state that politely.<p>Most candidates who say nothing are either underpaid or overpaid and are trying to dance around that, instead of simply reframing the conversation to be about your market value.

Sure, don&#x27;t tell them what you&#x27;re earning. Tell them what it would take to get you to leave... plus 15% for the inevitable downward negotiation with the manager. If your current employer is unwilling to pay you what you think you&#x27;re worth, you have an obligation to yourself to go into the market and find compensation that matches your expectations. With few exceptions, compensation discussions with your current employer should be mutually exclusive from compensation discussions with other firms. Businessmen don&#x27;t want to get into bidding wars when they can avoid it.

The frustrating thing about this is that the entire concept of salary negotiations is one of the prime causes of unequal pay between genders.<p>The entire culture of a company trying to offer you less than you&#x27;re worth so that they can save a few pennies is disgusting.<p>There shouldn&#x27;t be salary negotiations - people who do the same job should be paid the same salary. If you want to negotiate for extra vacation days or a signing bonus or whatever, fine, but not salary. Just pay people a fair salary and pay them the same.<p>The current salary negotiation setup is extremely detrimental to people and should be eliminated, not encouraged.

Is there a crowdsourced list of startups that use shady recruiting practices somewhere? Not too long ago I was approached by a recruiter for a Unicorn company that repeatedly refused to move forward in the process before I disclosed my &quot;accepted salary range&quot; (asking for their budget, as people have suggested, gave me no response either). This was before I had even met a single person employed at the company. Normally I would have gone around the person in question, but this experience left a really bad impression of the company to me.

It depends. If this a decent headhunter, and not just some chump recruiter trying to find lukewarm bodies, then they are trying to answer the question:<p>&quot;What will it take for you to switch jobs?&quot;<p>No problem with telling them your current salary- their goal is to offer you something better, and you can straight up say I&#x27;d need 30% more to switch. Remember, they get paid a % of your salary to get you!

Eh, obviously. Now imagine my surprise when I came to Hong Kong and started to see candidates&#x27; current salary on their CVs without even being asked for it.<p>Not to mention that many companies do &#x27;require&#x27; it. Next time I should claim it&#x27;s confidential. Just to see how they react to a novel situation.

Never never. The market is competitive. Just tell them &quot;I&#x27;d be interested to hear how your company&#x2F;client values my experience&quot; or &quot;I&#x27;m open to competitive offers&quot;. I&#x27;ve received crazy good job offers by simply never revealing salary.

Wait, what happened to freely disclosing your salary to everyone? Remember the hashtag movement??<p>You mean to tell me that this is actually a bad idea?

Too bad this article makes the flawed assumption that getting a higher salary is just better.<p>I recommend reading Kahneman... here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;107&#x2F;38&#x2F;16489.full.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;107&#x2F;38&#x2F;16489.full.pdf</a>