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Comment by chaosharmonic | Hacker News Reader

You're describing levels. If your range is so wide the top of the range is double the bottom of the range, you're hiring at multiple levels, and you should just say that. You should also have more detailed descriptions that help you and candidates differentiate what those levels are.

More broadly than that -- it's not that you need to pay everyone the same, it's that you need clear structure around how your pay works.

An example that became a problem with one previous employer was that they kept saying "performance" was their only determining factor for pay, after it had come out that exactly one person on our team had been offered bonuses as a performance incentive.

It's not actually performance-based if you have different and better reward structures, or if you can't/won't explain why gaps exist.

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It's mainly specialties, not just levels. Are you a graphic designer that can also build your designs for the web? Were you previously consulting for our largest customer? Do you speak Welsh for our important client in Pembroke? Did you previously work in tech stack X and want to get back to it, and could lead our effort into that market? I'll pay more for these even if they come in at the same grade. Pay is very subjective, it is a prediction about the value an employee can or does bring balanced against their next best option.

Many of those things you can still just say, in a job description, as details that make you stand out. Many of those specific details do have tangible value (though I'd still say if you include words like "lead" you're describing levels), and you're not necessarily just describing vibes, but what you also aren't describing is a reason why you wouldn't have some idea of what you would pay someone in normal circumstances.

Say that no one you interview has those particulars, and you hire someone who's just -- by your regular, baseline standards -- qualified for the job. Do you have a cutoff for what you would pay those people? Then you should probably post that, and then just act like companies that comply with this stuff already and include some kind of disclaimer, that extraordinary candidates may still fall somewhere outside that range.

Because I could write 5 pages filled with these potential factors and it would be confusing to most candidates. Why specify Welsh when less than 1% of staff or candidates speak it?

> Because I could write 5 pages filled with these potential factors and it would be confusing to most candidates. Why specify Welsh when less than 1% of staff or candidates speak it?

You want to set laws that hurt 99% of employees for a theoretical benefit to a 1% case for the employer?

what's the point of a pay grade if the pay is wildly different in the same grade?

it's just multiple grades at that point masquerading behind a broken HR system

"level" can be an internal designation to communicate to others about the problems you can take on. Says nothing about pay. Many ways for a company to operate.

People seem very attached - emotionally, almost morally - to a model of hiring that looks like this:

* The company decides to open a specific position, which it will fill no matter what.

* The position will pay the same amount no matter who fills it.

* There exists a binary condition called "qualified" which people metaphysically are or aren't.

* The job must not go to an unqualified person, but could go to any qualified applicant.

* Society may instruct you to use certain non-merit-based criteria to prefer some qualified applicants over others, but hiring managers and teams must not use their own subjective feelings or relationships to do so.

I can understand how a civil service or other massive bureaucracy full of principal-agent problems arrives at these rules, but they are obviously not the only valid way to assemble a high-performing team or the best one in all circumstances.

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