Adding Salary Ranges To Internal Job Postings

HR Magazine, August, 2000 by Patricia A. Rouzer

"The HR professional needs to try as hard as he or she can to change that kind of thinking," says Schalbe.

Armed with his personal research, an employee who applies for a job within his company and discovers that the salary is not competitive with external positions is probably going to leave at the first opportunity, Schalbe says. "In this highly competitive market it is just silly to try to hide salary information," she says.

Larson adds, "If I were looking for a job and found out that a company I was applying to was not up front about their pay practices, it would raise a real red flag for me. A company that doesn't understand that employees have tremendous access to data about the job market nationally or regionally is not in touch with today's world."

Two decades ago, people placed great emotional stock in their salary and closely guarded their salary information. "The world is different now," says Larson. "We are awash in information, and in a market where there are more skilled jobs than there are people to fill them, salary is not personal."

Is Your Pay Out of Whack?

A refusal to consider posting salary ranges for internal openings may be a symptom that the entire compensation system needs revisiting.

"Sometimes, when a company has grown quickly, no one has really ever looked at the company's compensation structure; they've been too busy hiring people to fill specific needs," Kager says. "They need to take a close look at how jobs are classified within their company and then survey what is going on in the world outside."

"Once HR has devised a sound compensation structure, they have completed half their work," Kager says. "The other half is making sure that every hiring manager understands how their open position fits into the compensation system and that they can explain it to job applicants, both internal and external."

Where the compensation system is in flux, posting salary ranges probably is not a good idea. For example, companies undergoing acquisitions or mergers should hold off on posting salary ranges internally, Kager says.

One of his clients, a manufacturing firm, recently acquired several businesses. Employees in the acquired businesses are used to varied compensation systems that the manufacturer has not yet integrated into a single system. To post ranges now would confuse employees, says Kager, who is advising the company not to post salary ranges before the compensation systems are evaluated and reconciled.

HR bears the responsibility for educating managers and employees about compensation, Kager adds. And Schalbe notes that HR has another responsibility--knowing whether the employer is subject to any laws requiring posting of salary information.

Schalbe says her company had to comply with a California law requiring employers to post internally the precise salaries--not just the salary ranges--of immigrant employees seeking green cards. "There were no repercussions" among employees, she recalls. "Some employees asked why we posted a salary, not a range, but no one was embarrassed or questioned it, including the employees whose actual salary was posted."