Job Interviewer: “Alex, what is your current and expected salary”?
Alex: Sir, my current salary was XXXXXX.XXX INR per month. As far as expected CTC is concerned, I have nothing in mind. You can offer me according to your budget for this position.
To interview: “But you must have some figure in mind, right?”
Alex: No sir.
Now this scenario raises a question, do you hire employees and offer them a salary based on their current or last salary or do you offer them a salary based on your budget for the position? If you’re offering them a salary based on their last salary taken, I’m sorry to say, but your HR and admin team isn’t doing a good job. There is something called Manpower Planning, which takes data from the Annual HR Budget and the Annual Compensation Plan. I’m not sure how anyone can contract without a Manpower Plan in place. This is suicidal. By offering salaries based on the candidates’ latest salaries rather than the salary budget for the position, you are creating an imbalance in internal equity and, as a result, weeding out disgruntled and disgruntled employees.
Any job description will consist of the following elements:
- role description
- List of required skills and competencies
- Details of experience and education required
- Reporting Hierarchy / Growth Path [Placement in Organizational Structure]
- Whether or not this role is eligible for Relocation Assistant
- Compensation budget range and benefit entitlement for the role
- Workplace
A job description that omits any of these elements will be considered incomplete.
Let’s remember this. If your organization is a brand the candidate wants to be associated with, or if the position is very challenging and gives the candidate the opportunity to push their limits and be creative, the candidate won’t mind accepting an offer from an organization, even if the the compensation offered is 10-15% less than your current package.
Conversely, if the candidate has the required education, experience, skills and competencies and has passed all rounds of interviews, and if their psychometric assessment report verifies their candidacy for the position and they also have a verification report of favorable referrals, so why shouldn’t you be offered twice your current or last earned salary if that’s your salary budget for that position?
Posting compensation and benefits details along with the job description is good hiring practice. It simplifies the hiring process and makes it agile. Attract the right talent. While hiding compensation and benefits details from the job description, cast the organization in a bad light. It shows inefficiency and insufficiency of the human resources function. It will attract several irrelevant profiles and unnecessarily complicate the selection process.
Alex, who serves as Customer Service Manager, has 12 years of Customer Service experience. His current (fixed) annual base salary is 1.2 million Indian rupees. He applied for TWO jobs: Job-A and Job-B, who were looking for an experience similar to Alex’s. None of these positions have posted their compensation budget for her position. Her profile was not shortlisted by any of these organizations. Although Organization-A considered that her current salary is much more than the maximum salary they can offer for this role; Organization-B thought the other way around. Now, if they had posted the compensation quote along with the job description, don’t you think it would have saved time for both the candidate and the recruiter in question? Candidates often apply for a job based on role description, experience, and qualification; while recruiter shortlist profiles are based on hidden information: the compensation budget.
Can you please explain and share why compensation and benefits details cannot be posted with a job description? What is the purpose and agenda of creating ambiguity and complexity?
Share your thoughts.
