What's the point of getting this data if it's not to pay less money? What is the value add?
- Set reasonable ranges to find the right candidates they are looking for faster and minimize hiring friction
- Standardize payment levels in a way that reduces legal liability in certain states like Colorado/California. Or the most generous reading of "reduces legal liability" would be "promoting fairness".
- Reduce the time spent by HR/other teams of negotiating or setting salaries, as they can simply target some target like "we want to pay more than 60% of companies like us"
- For budgeting/forecasting with new hires, this allows companies to have more confidence in their estimates as they plan hiring.
- Some companies now offer calculators even before you're hired with what your salary/compensation might look like, such as https://posthog.com/handbook/people/compensation
But yes, overall I do believe that most companies also expect a general reduction in salaries when they use these tools.
If they were aware of market rates, they could avoid making potential candidates laugh at them.
Not that I’m not happy with you, the OG and clearly greatest of the name!
"Dilution? What? Stop worrying about made-up words and let's go change the world!"
When you don't know what the market is paying, you're liable to lowball offers and refuse to raise them, and not get the employees you want.
If you know market rates, you can provide reasonable first offers, or have a more accurate idea of how high you should go.
It makes me wonder how it would affect salaries if companies were required to make the salary distribution public for all their roles. So you knew both the range where you were applying, as well as at other companies.
And also how that would interact with unionization. E.g. would it make collective wage bargaining less necessary to some degree? If workers felt they had the data to know they could bargain individually for more money?
I certainly don't trust that this doesn't hold wages down overall, particularly in the boom hiring market we had until recently.
A small businesses owner who pays themselves whatever is left over after expenses doesn’t care about what other companies pay, the company only has so much money. Apple could increase salaries up to the point where they make zero profit, but the goal is profit maximization not salary maximization.
It’s fundamentally the attempt to limit salaries that causes companies to look at the overall market.
Hiring well is hard - it's not super obvious if you aren't paying enough or your company isn't desirable or what else is the cause of not seeing good candidates. While in theory you could solve that by wildly overpaying, in practice you have to be able to justify your decision to higher ups in most cases, and pointing to a tool that shows what you really need to pay to get good people can be very helpful. I still find it gross, but, there are practical situations where it will drive salaries higher.
What you just described is speeding up a process not increasing wages.
If a company simply isn’t offering enough money they aren’t going to get the workers they want. Which then forces the company to either go without or increase their compensation, just like how every other market works.
> your company isn't desirable or what else is the cause
The clearest example of this principle is companies eventually learn they need to pay the asshole tax. Market research may suggest X is a reasonable number, but they simply don’t get enough people without paying appropriately.
> will drive salaries higher
It will drive some offers higher and get workers sooner, but an offer not accepted is a salary that doesn’t exist.
I've never seen a worker walk away once an offer is made. Getting workers in the door in the first place is hard, though.
Which means that it is really the marketing that needs to be improved. But how...
> how every other market works.
Every other market that has suffered from this kind of marketing problem starts to publish sale data! The labour market has just been slow to catch up with everyone else here. No doubt because, historically, getting people in the door was easy. That has only somewhat recently started to change.
I’ve personally walked away from several offers. It’s not uncommon to receive multiple offers at the same time and you can only accept one.
So perhaps your offers have been excessively generous?
But either way, it's pretty clear that the prevailing problem is finding people at all. Not just me, but most businesses have been struggling with the same problem. You can't tempt someone with more money if you have no way of communicating with them.
Which goes back to the marketing problem. Absolutely there is a marketing problem, but publishing price data is exactly how other markets have solved the problem. We shouldn't be shocked or disappointed that labour is going the same way. That's how markets deal with the problem.