Pay transparency: why a salary range in your vacancy works
No topic makes employers as hesitant, while the benefits are this clear. Why we publish the range with every vacancy.
Ask ten technical employers why there is no salary range in their vacancy and you hear the same worries: competitors read along, current employees will compare, and negotiating becomes harder. Understandable, but the cost of vagueness is bigger than the cost of openness.
Who you lose without a range
The strongest candidates have the least time. They don't apply for a role whose pay they have to guess, because the risk of wasted conversations is too big. A vacancy without a range therefore doesn't select for quality, but for who can afford to gamble. And those are rarely the profiles you searched months for. From our own practice: vacancies with a published range generate more and more relevant applications, precisely because candidates assess themselves correctly beforehand.
The most expensive scenario is free to prevent
Transparency also prevents recruitment's most painful scenario: three interviews, an enthusiastic candidate, and then falling through on an amount that could have been clear in minute one. Every collapsed final round costs weeks of lead time, demotivates everyone involved and sends a top candidate straight to your competitor, with a bad story about your process.
The three classic worries, dissected
Competitors already know the market rates; that is their job, and one phone call to a candidate suffices. Internal comparison is only a risk when your current salaries cannot be explained, and then the vacancy is not the problem but your pay structure; better to discover that yourself than through departing employees. And negotiating actually becomes easier with a range: the conversation is about where someone lands within the bracket based on experience and competences, not about the bracket itself. That is a substantive conversation instead of a poker game.
The legislator is coming anyway
On top of that, the European pay transparency directive step by step obliges employers to give candidates insight into pay upfront; its transposition into Belgian law simply makes this the norm in the coming years. Publishing ranges now means being ready for those rules, reaping the recruitment benefits today and profiling yourself as a transparent employer before you have to. It is exactly why we do it on every vacancy as standard: every role on our site shows a concrete gross monthly bracket.
Frequently asked questions
How wide may a salary range be?
Rule of thumb: the top sits 25 to 40 percent above the bottom. A bracket of 3,000 to 4,000 euros is credible and informative; a bracket of 2,500 to 6,000 euros says nothing and breeds distrust. If you work with levels (junior, medior, senior), publish a range per level.
What if a top candidate sits above my range?
Then you know it in conversation one instead of round three, and you can consciously choose: revisit the range, compose the package differently or part ways respectfully. All three beat investing weeks in a match that was never financially possible.
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