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Comment by fecak | Hacker News Reader

I was a recruiter for 20 years. In my experience, when a range was listed, every applicant expected to get offered at the top of the range.

So if the range was 80-100K and you had a candidate at the lower end of the experience/skills range for the job, that candidate becomes attached to that 100K number. He tells his friends "I found a job that pays 100K". Candidates don't pay much attention to the low number in the real world.

So the interviews happen, the candidate performs as expected (not superb) and gets an offer for 80K. He thinks he's leaving 20K on the table if he accepts, or that he's getting lowballed. If the job had been posted 60-80K, he wouldn't have felt shorted at all.

This is a simplification of course, but posting salary led to lots of refused offers when the offer < the top figure.

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Could just be the job is acceptable at the top of the range and not the bottom. A company might not value the employee to the top of the range but the employee may equally not value the job at anything but the top of that range.

That's certainly a possibility, and in those situations an offer usually isn't given at all. If we (a) know a candidate will only accept the top end of the range and (b) the candidate doesn't qualify or interview at that level, there's no reason to make an offer at all.

When a range is given, in my experience a candidate will usually say "I'd only be interested at the top of that range" from the beginning if that's indeed the case. The point I made in my initial comment is more aligned to situations when a candidate says they are OK with the range but don't 'commit' (prior to interviews) on where they feel they qualify on that range.

For me as a developer it makes perfect sense: top of the range is equal to company's budget for that position, and if they are not willing to give you top of the range salary then the changes are that some other, more skilled candidate will show up and take the job.

So, simply put: if they don't want to give you top of the range it means that they weren't impressed enough by you, and you should continue your job search until you find a company that is.

Or they were impressed by you, but feel your market value is below the maximum they are willing to pay. When companies hire, they have a model of an ideal candidate and an acceptable candidate. We want x, y, and z, but we'd be willing to take 2 of the 3. XYZ is worth more than XY.

If the company only had one ideal candidate profile that was acceptable, that would change things a bit.

That's a huge range though. 25% difference. Better to just have a junior listing at 80k and a senior listing at 100k and that simplifies it.

In theory it's a large range, but in practice it really isn't. Candidates regularly negotiate starting salary to 10-20% above an initial offer, so a range like this is pretty common. You also need to keep in mind that job ads can cost $, so a small company on a budget doesn't want to be placing a bunch of ads for each potential level of hire when all they want is someone who can do the job.

"Junior" and "Senior" probably oversimplifies it. You could have a senior with 10 years and one with 20 years. The salary difference often won't be as pronounced (because salaries tend to plateau at a certain point), but there will usually (and should) be a difference.

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