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Salary conundrum: pros and cons of pay within job advertisements

Published on: 23 Feb 2022
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Adobe Image: fraserntukula  / Adobe Stock

Image: © fraserntukula / Adobe Stock

For the majority of people, work is an exercise in earning money. Let’s be honest, if you didn’t need to, most of us wouldn’t be spending our lives working. It is only in Utopian works of fiction that people are able to live without the worries that a monetised society brings. In the real world, money is the enabler for almost everything and work is the conduit through which it is earned.

If you take an average 9-to-5 role you will be at work for around 50 per cent of your waking hours, and we all know veterinary work consumes much more than this, so we want to be compensated accordingly. However, for the most part, we have to make initial decisions of how we are going to spend this huge chunk of our lives without a clear understanding of the pay we will receive for doing so. That is, I mean, without a stated salary on a job advert.

Translating adverts

It is hard enough to translate the requirements of certain roles as many job adverts seem to have been written by someone who is fluent in “business middle-management speak”, rather than simple English. Who knows what “advocate our brand architecture to enable blue-sky, laser-focused thinking” actually means? But if I randomly selected 50 job adverts to read, the majority would include such language. Jargon is rife in this area and only serves to confuse.

How many of us have applied for jobs that are either way above or below our experience level because it is not explicitly stated, or extremely hard to decipher the true requirements or responsibilities of a job just from the advert? A published salary can be a useful tool in these circumstances as it gives an indication of how senior or complex a role may be.

If you were seeking a senior management role, you may not be able to fully understand every line of an advert, but you would be able to identify relevant roles by searching for ones that have salaries greater than £60,000. Much the same, those seeking entry-level roles would be wasting their time looking for roles in the £50,000 to £70,000 range.

However, if salaries are not included on advertisements, prospective employers are relying on their applicant’s ability to translate their “business speak”. How many perfect candidates have not applied for a role because they could not understand its requirements, level or salary?

'Competitive salary'

Recruiters seem to have caught on to some of these issues as more and more adverts state that they pay a “competitive salary”. This means the compensation is “at or above the market rate” for the role and should provide a level of clarity for the prospective applicants to know what they are applying for. However, in reality it is a “get out of jail free” card, as the lack of specificity still perpetuates the problem.

The market rate for most roles includes a huge gulf between the highest and lowest values. For example, as of 2021, the average salary for a veterinary surgeon is £35,6381, with a range from £28,000 up to £50,0001. So, in theory, two veterinary surgeon roles both advertising a ”competitive salary” could potentially have a £22,000 variance in their salaries. How is one to know if the salary being offered is at the top, middle or bottom of this range?

Another concept to consider here is the publication of a salary or range provides applicants and employees, alike, with an effective ceiling for their earning potential within the role and organisation in question. Maybe you are new to a business and are thinking in the coming years that your salary, as you become more competent, will increase accordingly, but you negotiated a starting salary above what you expected.

You may have been with a business for a number of years and have been repeatedly told that your work is exceptional, but your salary has stagnated in the past year or two. These could be symptoms of a scenario where your salary is near or at the ceiling that your employer is willing to pay.

The impact of competition

Of course, I understand it is the choice of the recruiter to provide details of salaries, as there is no obligation in law to do so. In fact, there are some more issues that employers will want to avoid in not doing so.

As with the above concepts, current employees may be keeping an eye on adverts for their, or equivalent, roles to understand if their own salary is still competitive. This may especially be the case if they have been employed for a number of years in the same role and have received only inflation-linked incremental raises.

Not overtly stating the salary in this case, provides a situation where current employees cannot compare their own situation to that of others, who may have frequently moved roles. Furthermore, this also gives the employer the upper hand in any negotiations during the application process.

This is an ethical grey area, however, if a practice or employer can give someone the job while trying to keep its salary as low as possible – it effectively retains a higher profit margin. It is an issue that can be seen across many industries – especially among smaller privately owned businesses as the cash flow situation is a lot closer to home and not in the hands of a chief executive, 14 management levels above.

Salary negotiation is not the only financial discussion that employers might want to avoid. They will also want to prevent a bidding war between current and prospective employers. This is where the applicant is able to play two businesses against each other to negotiate higher recompense for their work.

This is particularly pertinent in the veterinary world as the current shortage of vets and nurses means the worker holds a power position over the employer. The prospective employee has the opportunity to work for any number of practices and, if he or she can, could hold out for the “best” deal. On the other hand, practices may be forced into a bidding war as their financial situation is outweighed by the more, significant, need for vets and nurses to serve their clients.

Any negotiations, or competition, between employers has the potential to push salaries higher and higher, without any actual uplift in skills or capabilities for the industry itself. Very few people will want to take on a new role at the same, or lower, salary than their last position making this, in a world where there is a shortage of skilled workers, a perpetual cycle of increasing salaries.

Exceptional candidates

However, it is not all underhand techniques attempting to pay people as little as possible for their services. In some cases, salaries are not listed because the organisation in question may not have an upper limit for a truly exceptional candidate. A person who may bring more to a role than competence purely in the core duties may be discouraged from applying if he or she believes his or her services are worth more than the published range.

Businesses will, of course, not be looking to hand out higher salaries for no additional return, but they may reach deeper into their pockets for an absolutely perfect fit. Ensuring as many people as possible apply is the name of this game, which means not discouraging those who are looking for a higher salary while encouraging those to apply who may be looking to take their next step on their career ladder. In both cases, not publishing a salary range may have these desired effects.

Recruiting managers may not be overly thrilled of this prospect, however, as it has become normal practice, at least outside of the veterinary world, to receive hundreds of applications for a single position. The process that has meant to encourage applicants has clearly had the desired effect, but with one drawback: impromptu or optimistic applications by unqualified persons.

The prospect of sifting through and shortlisting hundreds of applications is a daunting task, but when they also include CVs from those with no relevant qualifications or experience it makes the job twice as difficult. Of course, this could happen in any of the scenarios outlined as some people will get excited about the prospect of a large salary and send in their CV “just in case” the recruiter sees something it likes.

The same coin

Many arguments exist both for and against the publication of the salary on a job advert. They are not only confined to businesses attempting to keep costs down, but also to find the right candidate for an open position. The fact of the matter is your viewpoint will be driven by which side of the recruiting process you are currently on.

If you are applying for roles you will want to know the salary of the job, if you are already in the role you will want to know if you are being paid fairly, or if you are the recruiter it is likely you will want to keep back the salary for the role so you can reap the potential benefits this may bring. They are all sides of the same coin that are all attempting to achieve the same thing – to find the right people, in the right positions to make businesses run as smoothly as possible.

  • This article first appeared in Vet Times (Volume 51, Issue 51, Page 6).

References

1. PayScale (2021). Average veterinary surgeon salary in United Kingdom, www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Veterinary_Surgeon/Salary (accessed 11 October 2021).