our jobs have wide salary ranges — how can we be up-front about that without every candidate expecting the top of the range?

Two questions, similar answers. The first one:

I am hiring my first ever direct report, and I live in a salary transparency state. My HR department notified me that, legally, you have to post the entire salary range possible for the role and you cannot limit it to your preferred hiring range. This puts me, as the hiring manager, in a tough spot because candidates see a range of $75,000-110,000 and immediately believe one of two things:

1) They can start at $110,000 if they meet the basic requirements or
2) The role automatically starts at $75,000 and I’m a horrible hiring manager for pricing it so low (yes, I got that comment on the job posting)

The reality is, the $75,000 is for someone who would barely meet the requirements and would need a lot of training/hand-holding, and $105,000 means you have many, many years of experience and are at the complete top of your game with no room for growth. I don’t even make the top of my salary range. Are there better ways to explain this on a job posting, or is it just what it is?

The second one:

I am 100% in favor of salary range transparency. I’m in Connecticut, which requires employers to share a salary range at some point during the hiring process, but we have made it our policy to do it from the start like many other states now require. In general, this has been good at making sure that we are spending our time on strong candidates who are comfortable with the stated range and has significantly reduced having a mismatch of expectations at the very end. But, I’m running into an unintended consequence that I’m not sure how to deal with.

In education, salaries are generally dictated by years of relevant experience and the degrees a teacher holds. Our school has some autonomy on salaries, so there are merit increases and teachers in hard-to-fill positions that make more, which means we do not have a set salary schedule to publish. So when we post a position, the actual range could be, for example, $50,000, for a brand new teacher with a bachelor’s degree and no previous experience, all the way to $120,000, for a veteran teacher with a master’s degree. If that is the range we publish, candidates assume they’ll be able to negotiate to the higher end. We’ve thought about publishing a tigher range like $70,000-100,000, but then that would be too high for new teachers and too low for veteran teachers who might opt not to apply at all.

How can we be authentic and still set clear expectations when we often have to just enter a numeric range and cannot offer more context or a public salary schedule?

In both cases, and in all cases like this, the way to handle this is to lean into the transparency that you’ve already started with and take it a step further by spelling out what you explained here.

For example:

“The salary range for this position is $75,000-110,000, with the low end of that range for candidates who match the low end of the listed experience range and where we would expect to invest significantly in your training and the high end for extremely experienced candidates (X years or more doing Y) who would be function at a senior level with significant autonomy. Most hires fall in the middle of that range.”

Or:

“We’re open to several different versions of this role — junior, mid-level, or senior. For the junior role, we’re seeking (list qualifications) with a salary range of $A-B. For the mid-level role, we’re seeking (list qualifications) with a salary range of $C-D. For the more senior version of the role, we’re seeking (list qualifications) with a salary range of $E-F. We encourage you to apply if you meet any of these profiles.”

Or:

“The salary range for this position varies heavily based on experience and education. A candidate with no previous teaching experience typically starts around $50,000; a veteran teacher with a master’s degree may earn $120,000.”

You can also address it openly when you have your first conversation with candidates, like in a phone screen: “For candidates with your level of experience in X, you’d be in the $X-Y part of our salary range.” Then they know and can decide if they want to continue or not. In fact, you could even include a line like this in your job posting after the suggested language above: “If you are unsure where you might fall in that range, please apply and we will discuss it early on in our hiring process.”

Regardless of how clear you are, you will always get people who are convinced they should come in at the top of your range without much basis for it, but by spelling it out like this — and especially by giving them tailored info about where they would fall in your range early on in a phone screen — you’ll mitigate a lot of it.

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