Why I’d Rather Know Your Real Salary Expectations

Salary can sometimes be the slightly awkward part of a recruitment conversation. Candidates don’t necessarily want to tell a recruiter what they’re earning, employers don’t always want to reveal their absolute maximum and everybody can end up dancing around the question in case somebody gives away too much information.

From my point of view, I’d much rather have an open conversation about it at the beginning. If you’re looking for £55,000, telling me you’d “consider something around £50,000” doesn’t really help either of us. Equally, if a client has a genuine maximum that they simply cannot exceed, I need to know that before I ask somebody to invest their time in two interviews.

Tell Me What Would Make You Move

What somebody earns now and what they would need to move jobs aren’t necessarily the same number. You might currently be on £45,000 but feel that changing employer, taking on additional responsibility or adding another 30 minutes to your commute would only make sense at £50,000. That’s useful information for me to have.

It also isn’t always purely about the basic salary. One job might offer a better pension, bonus, overtime, flexible working or considerably shorter journey. For a contractor, the rate is obviously important, but so are the likely duration of the assignment, hours, location and nature of the project.

What I’m really trying to understand is what the whole opportunity needs to look like before it becomes interesting.

Nobody Benefits From the Wrong Conversation

There is nothing more frustrating than getting to the end of a recruitment process and discovering that the two sides were never going to agree on money. The candidate has taken time away from work to attend interviews, the client has spent hours meeting them and we’ve spent time coordinating the whole process, only to discover a gap that could have been identified during the first telephone conversation.

Of course, things can change during the process. A client may meet an exceptional candidate and decide they can stretch the budget, or a candidate may discover enough about the opportunity to decide they would accept slightly less than they originally thought. But it’s much easier to deal with those situations when everybody knows roughly where they stand from the beginning.

I’m Not Trying to Talk You Down

Candidates occasionally worry that telling a recruiter their minimum salary simply gives us an opportunity to get them as cheaply as possible. That’s not how a sensible recruitment relationship works. If I know a client is prepared to pay £50,000 for the right person, there is no advantage to me in persuading a candidate worth £50,000 to accept £45,000 and have them feeling underpaid six months later.

A placement that falls apart because somebody discovers they could have earned considerably more elsewhere isn’t a good placement for the candidate, the client or us.

Final Thought

Salary conversations don’t need to be uncomfortable. Tell me what you’re earning if you’re comfortable doing so, but more importantly, tell me what you realistically need from your next move.

The clearer everybody is at the beginning, the easier it is for me to concentrate on the thing that actually matters: finding an engineering role that you would genuinely want to accept.




Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

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Why I’d Rather Know Your Real Salary Expectations
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Co-Founder & Director