When a person is looking for work, he must face numerous obstacles. Some may be the competition with the rest of the people who submit applications for the same job offer, the correct writing of the curriculum vitae that is sent to the job offerers, the realization of the interview and the selection tests and the management of stress and the expectations during all this process.
In addition, the omission of salary in job offers constitutes another obstacle that affects especially women. In this sense, the North American state of California currently obliges companies to specify the concrete or estimated remuneration in their job offers. Sin embargo, certain companies are avoiding this requirement of a Latin form.
A salary between 90,000 and 900,000 dollars. According to a study published recently for the platform Comprehensive.io, Netflix and Tesla are including very large annual salary brackets in their job offers. For example, in the first case, a job offer for the position of software engineer has been awarded a salary ranging from 90,000 to 900,000 dollars a year. And in the second case, Elon Musk’s company offers, for a similar position, a salary that ranges from 83,200 to 417,000 dollars annually.
Salary bands are expanding too much. The report was carried out through the analysis of around 53,000 job offers made by 700 companies in the technological sector, concluding that the average salary range of the offers ranges from 130,000 to 200,000 dollars annually. According to Roger Lee, co-founder of Comprehensive.io, there are companies that, deliberately, include a “very wide” salary bracket, a decision that for many people would not be in line with the spirit of the law, he said in statements to Bloomberg.
Perplexity of job applicants. One of those people is Christie Allen, belonging to HashiCorp’s Human Resources team, who published a ‘tweet‘ criticizing the Netflix offer that we have mentioned previously: “You have a job offer for the position of Software Engineer in a beautiful and prestigious organization that, proudly, showed a salary range of 90,000 to 900,000 dollars. ¿Cómo puede ayudar eso?”.
Más trabas. It is a decision on the part of the companies that hinders the objective of salary transparency, which is to reduce the gender gap. In this sense, as Shelly Holt, responsible for the Department of Human Resources in PayScale, explained in a report published by the BBC in September 2021, transparency favors salary equality because, in general, women do not agree to negotiate a salary and if they are penalized more severely when they ask for an increase of the same.
No, it’s the first time. On the other hand, this practice has already been carried out by certain companies in New York, where a salary transparency law has been applied since 2021, some of which offered salary bands with a variation of two million dollars, as reported by Bloomberg in the past mes de noviembre
There are companies that are not convinced. However, it is not the only formula that firms employ to specify the salary corresponding to their job offers. According to an article published by the BBC in September 2021, some companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Nike prevented workers from Colorado (whose salary transparency law came into effect at the beginning of that year) from applying for jobs.
There is no turning back. On the other hand, showing an excessively high salary band for a job position does not seem like it is going to prevent the extension of the salary transparency law. In this sense, Washington will be the next North American state to apply a similar standard, and in Europe, Brussels is working on a law that obliges companies to inform about the salary in job offers, as well as to facilitate workers with an explanation on the criteria used to define their remuneration.
