Just Post the Salary Range: Why "Competitive" Is Meaningless

If your salary is actually competitive, why not tell everyone what it is?

"Competitive salary" is one of the most quietly honest phrases in hiring, for the wrong reason. It's everywhere. Every job posting claims it. And when something is ubiquitous, it stops carrying information. A candidate scrolling through forty listings reads "competitive" forty times and learns nothing about any of them.

The question this piece is going to try to answer is simple: is writing "competitive salary" instead of a number helping you, or hurting you? The data – and a whole continent's worth of recent legislation – suggests it's hurting you, in ways that are easy to measure and unusually easy to fix.

Why we hide the number

The usual argument for leaving the range off a posting goes like this: "If we publish a number, we give up negotiating leverage. Candidates will anchor on the top of the range. Internal employees will see it and complain. We're better off keeping it flexible."

Each of those points has a grain of truth. None of them survive a close look.

On leverage: what you're actually giving up when you name a range is your ability to underpay candidates who didn't know what the market was. That's not leverage. That's an information asymmetry, and the candidates who notice it most are the ones with the most options – the ones most likely to walk away before you ever meet them.

On anchoring: candidates who already know the market rate have already anchored. Candidates who don't, are either going to accept less than they should, resent it later, and leave, or apply blind, spend four hours of their time, and bail at the offer stage when the number lands. Neither outcome is good for you.

On internal employees: if a public range for a new role creates tension with existing pay, the range isn't the problem. The internal pay structure is the problem. Publishing the range simply surfaces something that was already broken.

What hiding the number actually costs

Three specific costs, in order of how quickly they hurt.

You filter out the candidates with options. A strong candidate in a strong market treats their time like a scarce resource. They have three postings open in three tabs. Two of them have ranges. One of them says "competitive". The one that says "competitive" is the last tab they click – and if the first two lead to a conversation, they may never click it at all. You don't see those candidates, so you don't know you're losing them.

You pay twice for the same conversation. The number comes up eventually – at screening, at offer, at reference check. If the first time you and the candidate actually align on pay is in week six, and it turns out you're £20k apart, you've both just burnt six weeks on a conversation that was always going to end the same way. Post the range and that week-six conversation happens in week zero.

You hire people who resent the number. Candidates who accept offers without good comp visibility often discover the market rate a few months in, and then start quietly looking. Regretted hires are expensive and slow. The range, posted early, prevents them.

What the data shows

The evidence on pay transparency has moved from anecdote to trend over the last few years, driven partly by legislation in a growing number of US states and Canadian provinces.

82% of workers say pay transparency affects where they apply. That's not a preference. That's a filter. A majority of your candidates are actively choosing between postings based on whether the number is there.

And the applications you get back are not just more numerous. 66% of organisations that post pay ranges report higher applicant quality – and 70% report more applications in total. Those two numbers in combination matter. They suggest the transparency isn't just pulling in more people indiscriminately; it's sorting the right people toward your role and the wrong people away.

Zoom out and the market trend is unmistakeable. The monthly share of online job postings that include pay info rose from about 15% before January 2018 to roughly 53% by January 2024. A third of that increase appears to be driven by legislation; the rest is employers voluntarily catching up to where candidates are.

The BC experiment

If you want a clean natural experiment, British Columbia ran one.

The BC Pay Transparency Act became law in May 2023, requiring employers to include expected pay or a pay range in every public job posting. The compliance data is stark: BC postings with pay details rose from 49% in Q3 2023 to 76% by February 2024, inside a year, with only 61 reports of non-compliance in the same period.

Companies adapted. The sky did not fall. The thing that is interesting isn't that most BC employers now post ranges – it's that the law simply forced a behaviour that was already measurably better for the market, and almost nobody moved to punish them for it.

The obvious push-back

The sharpest critique of pay transparency laws is that some employers respond by posting fewer roles. The research here is real. After Colorado's law took effect, Indeed daily postings fell about 8.2% in Colorado relative to Utah, as some national employers chose not to post Colorado-specific roles to avoid publishing the range.

That's a real effect. But notice what it tells you about those employers: their preferred equilibrium was to hire people without telling them what the role paid. The roles that disappeared weren't eliminated – they were moved, relabelled, or filled through back-channels. The candidates those roles hurt most were the ones who couldn't afford to be in the back-channels to begin with.

For a company that's trying to compete on the quality of its hiring process, the Colorado data is an argument for transparency, not against it. If the market is segmenting between employers who show the number and employers who won't, you want to be on the side candidates prefer.

How to actually post the range

A few simple rules that most of the mess in practice:

1. Post a real range, not a theatre range. The average published US range in 2023 had a max about 25% higher than the min – around $16k of spread on a typical role. That's honest and usable. A range of $50k–$300k is a dodge and candidates know it.
2. State what the number includes and excludes. Base salary? On-target earnings? Equity? Make it unambiguous. Candidates who feel deceived at offer stage were usually deceived by the posting, even unintentionally.
3. Bring pay up in the first conversation, not the sixth. Even with the range on the posting, the very first call should confirm that the candidate's expectations sit inside it. Two minutes now saves six weeks later.
4. Fix the internal-equity problem properly. If posting the range for a new role would cause a mutiny from existing employees, that's information worth knowing. Better to find out now than at their exit interview.

Where lemonly fits

We built lemonly because too much of hiring is run on information asymmetry – roles that don't say what they pay, screening that doesn't say what's being tested, feedback that never gets delivered. Our candidate screening product sits on the employer side of that problem: assessing every applicant transparently against the same published criteria, so both sides of the process know what they're being measured against. The more open the hiring process is, the better the outcomes on both sides. Posting the range is the single easiest step in that direction.

Find the talent you're looking for

lemonly delivers qualified candidates on-demand. Find out how.

Book A Demo

Pick a time for your demo on the next page.

Common objections, answered

Won't publishing a range limit our negotiating leverage?

It limits your ability to underpay candidates who didn't know the market. That isn't leverage – that's an information asymmetry, and the candidates who notice it are the ones with the most options. If "leverage" is the argument, you're optimising for the wrong candidates.

What if existing employees see the range and complain?

That's a signal, not a problem. If the posted range materially exceeds what your current team is paid for the same role, you have an internal-equity issue that was going to surface eventually – in an exit interview, a Glassdoor review, or a counter-offer letter. Better to find it now than via attrition.

How wide can the range be?

Narrower than you think. The US average in 2023 was about 25% between min and max – roughly $16k on a typical role. A $50k–$300k range is not a range; it's an evasion. Pick a band you'd actually pay inside, and explain what determines where a candidate lands.

Do we have to follow through and pay inside the range?

Yes. If the offer lands materially below the posted range, a candidate feels baited and will tell their network. If it lands above, you've successfully hidden the top of the range from every other candidate in your pipeline. Both failure modes are expensive. Pick a real range and stick to it.

Key takeaways

• "Competitive salary" is ubiquitous, which is why it carries no information. Candidates read it as noise, or as a warning.
• 82% of workers say pay transparency affects where they apply. The ones most affected are the ones with the most options.
• Posting a range correlates with both higher applicant quality (66% of employers report better applicants) and more applications overall (70% report more volume).
• BC's Pay Transparency Act took compliance from 49% to 76% in under a year. Companies adapted; the sky didn't fall.
• Post a real range (typically ~25% spread), bring pay up in the first conversation, and fix the internal-equity issue if it surfaces. None of these are hard. All of them save you weeks.