I never answer questions about my past or expected salary, not to employers and not to recruiters.
Most employers don't ask, and the few that have (perhaps by having a part of an employment form ask for previous salary) have never made my leaving that information out an issue.
Most recruiters, if they even ask, respect my decision not to talk about it, but I've been pressed hard on this by a handful of recruiters, and have had this be a deal breaker for a couple of them. One recruiting firm admitted that they were paid by the employers to get this information. I wasn't getting paid to give this information out, however, and it's worth more to me to keep it private as I'm placed at a disadvantage in negotiations if I name a number first.
It's still a seller's market for IT talent, and there are plenty of other fish in the sea, so if some recruiters can't accept that I won't name a number, it's their loss.
It's great that NYC is taking the lead on this, and I really hope the rest of the US follows suit.
Agree with you in principle (your previous deal with company A is absolutely none of company B's business) but I would like to challenge you on one point:
> I'm placed at a disadvantage in negotiations if I name a number first.
... This is unlikely to be true. Generally, in price negotiations it is advantageous to name a number first. This is known as anchoring and basically the theory is that the end result is better for you if the company has to wheedle you down from 170k than if they anchor the price at 100k and you have to argue them up from there.
Plus, it saves a lot of wasted negotiation time on both sides if your price is just way too high for the company and this is clear from the beginning.
(edit: I'm talking about expected salary in general, not disclosing your current salary level)
I remember with Ticketmaster I got into an actual eight minute long back and forth during a recruitment call about my "number." Eight minutes is a long time on the phone. It went something like
her: "Just so we have an idea of your range..."
me: "I understand why that information would be helpful to you, but I can assure you that if everything else is a good fit, salary is the last place we'll find ourselves disagreeing."
Back and forth. Eventually I had to just cut her off and let her know it wasn't a good fit.
I've never had a problem winning the "give us your number" battle before, I honestly have to admire the tenacity of that recruiter. Seems like Ticketmaster genuinely cannot hire without getting that information.
I've had a handful of potential employers ask straight up for my current salary, and they ALL got squirrely when I refused to disclose it. Currently batting zero with companies that ask for (and I politely decline to give) that info.
EDIT: Also I kind of disagree with your assessment that it's a "seller's market" for IT talent. A lot of companies appear to be fishing for good deals, but is there really that much actual hiring going on? A lot of companies saying they're looking for talent does not a hot job market make.
Both Google and Oracle made it a condition of getting hired. Meaning they were ready to walk away if previous pay wasn't disclosed. Oracle even wanted scans of W2s ...
I've found it easier to just lie in these situations by giving a number that's significantly higher than what I'm currently making, and more in line with the top end of what I think they're willing to pay me/what I would be willing to work for. It has worked quite well for me. Obviously this only works if you are comfortable lying in this scenario.
I don't normally like to lie, but I see no moral issue with it in a situation like this where the system is intentionally rigged against you. They are systematically depriving people of pay; I'm not going to lose sleep over a small lie that rights that wrong.
I've never gotten a lot of grief about disclosing past salary. I generally try to set the anchor and conversation around what I want to be making to join their company. I have (very fortunately) never been in the position where I _had_ to leave or accept an offer on anything but my own terms, I feel that when you're negotiating from that position, the complete lack of pressure to accept a lower number becomes pretty apparent to the people on the other side of the conversation from you. Or I'm dense enough to not realize they were trying to wheedle me down and just flat didn't entertain the notion.
I've got a business partner (came from high on up in the land of the big four) that during a salary negotiation of our own he floated the idea of asking for our candidate's current salary, AND PROOF. Apparently over 'there', especially as you get higher up, it's completely commonplace. Having spent his whole career over there, it didn't occur to him that maybe people would rather just walk away from your company simply for asking than to answer the question.
Luckily, he's a great guy and after my half hour soap box tirade he came around to realizing that in an environment where people are _actually_ practicing a craft and have what would resemble real skills[0], they don't put up with it.
- [0] Not to say people working for the big megacorp accounting firms don't have real skills, but no, yeah, that's actually what I meant. I kid, I kid.
As a freelancer, I'm fairly up-front about my hourly rate. If they want to pay it, I'm happy. If they don't, that's fine too. If there are other interesting aspects about the project that make up for the lower pay, we can negotiate. But it saves me time not having to talk to clients who can't afford me.
But freelancing is a different market than salaried employment. I think for salaried positions it's up to the employer to be open about their pay range.
If the recruiter asks repeatedly, a trick that I learned is to answer that it's in your employee confidentiality agreement not to discuss the terms of your employment. It's arguably a true statement as well (in case you were concerned about telling a white lie)--your employer could be considering your salary as confidential because they obviously haven't disclosed it publicly, so you are taking a very conservative approach on the confidentiality terms in most contracts.
edit: the statement doesn't need to be legally defensible, it gives you an opportunity to redirect and ask what they are willing to pay for the position or to learn about their benefits package.
Has anyone run into issues for sharing a current salary that anchors the discussion too high? I could see how an employer might pass on a candidate who's actually interested in the job, just because they know they can't match what the candidate is currently making and it's likely a waste of time to spend hours evaluating someone who's making 50k more than what you could ever offer.
Or is this purely theoretical and not seen in practice?
In the interviews I've been to, it is not unusual to have them ask you how much you are expecting for a salary. I've thought about this before and I don't see a way to refuse to answer that question without breaking the flow and tone of the interview.
Do you recall any specific responses you've made to that question which allowed you to avoid answering it but still yielded positive results?
> I never answer questions about my past or expected salary, not to employers and not to recruiters.
That's great for you, but a prospective employer refused to put an official offer package together for me until they had proof of my recent salary.
And no, there weren't other contemporaneous offers on the table at the time, nor were there other employers in my industry whose practices greatly differed from above.
In short, I think this a great consumer protection rule. Not really consumer, but little guy/girl protection rule.
I was like that a few years back, when I felt I was underpaid. I am now on an above average salary for the location I am in (though I still feel underpaid - Spain!)
If I disclose my salary early it saves a lot of time wasting though it probably limits what I can ask for or will be offered.
> It's great that NYC is taking the lead on this, and I really hope the rest of the US follows suit.
There's a lot of positive remarks in this thread, that I don't really understand. I see the advantage if your current salary is unusually low, but it cuts both ways: without knowledge of the company, (and within an industry) salary contains more information than job title.
Some organizations use a month to month standard salary table for position which are not negotiable. Leaving the question as more for surveying the industry than a negotiating piece. However this is not often revealed until after the answer is given.
I very much doubt that many organizations do this, though I have experienced it myself.
Once upon a time I interviewed for a role in NYC. An employee that I spoke to said they paid pretty well, and I could expect about 120. The HR person wanted my previous salary, and I refused. Eventually they said their range was 130-150. I said it wasn't gonna work cause I was looking for something more like 220. They said okay we can do that no problem. My previous salary was 110.
Lots of people here talking from their own experience as highly skilled, in-demand professionals.
However, helping friends apply to jobs in other industries - specifically medical - I saw that most of the applications involved filling out an automated form that required prior salary information to complete.
There's no advantage to an employee from being forced to disclose this information and it perpetuates compensation discrepancies by gender/race/guts to ask. Very glad to see this made illegal.
Now, if they were really serious about fixing pay discrepancies, they'd make it mandatory to post salary ranges with job listings.
Have a google for: "can i lie to a employer about past salary" - it really really messes with people - people feel super uncertain about how to approach this situation. Throwing any confidence they have during the negotiation out the window.
Even now I hesitate to write this as a million people will come out and say never lie - what if they found out.
More than banning. There needs to be acceptance that if someone asks you. You are totally free to make any damn number up that you like. Seriously. Its a sales situation. It should not be like your under oath on the stand. Which is how most people view it.
It will be interesting to see how this affects the hiring markets. Out in SF/etc it came up in just about every discussion I had last time I was looking for work usually as part of the first phase. No point interviewing candidates that wouldn't accept the job. It's pretty much a risk mgmt exercise from the hiring side. Similarly, I always asked what the compensation range they're targeting is as I don't want to waste my time either.
I wonder if this ban addresses background checks covering the same information, because some companies do ask for this data from previous employers although not all provide it. Without protection there this ban seems fairly limited.
Anyhow, I don't agree with all advice to never disclose current/previous salary. In some scenarios certainly it makes sense, but in others it is the opposite. You want to justify a higher market value and set the expectation that you're unlikely to be interested unless they're willing to compensate at $X or higher. Of course it's different in terms of leverage if you're employed currently or not. Recruiters and interviewers will waste tons of your time if you don't get on the same page quickly. Lack of transparency around your compensation expectations will exacerbate this issue. Whether that means you tell them what you're making or what you'd like to make doesn't really matter, but you better do at least one of the two.
In my experience (external contract recruitment) the background check usually happens after an offer has been negotiated and accepted. I've also never seen a background check request for actual salary information. I'm not even sure how that would work... we would just send the candidates' information to this company that churns through court docs to see if they have a criminal history, send them to Quest to get drug tested, donesies bananas. Maybe in the employment verification stage? Even then though, I highly doubt a previous employer would offer that information up - oftentimes they weren't even allowed to comment on the quality of the candidates' work. Nightmare for reference checks to the big EPCs and operators like BP or Jacobs.
My past salary is an irrelevant information for my potential future employer. If they ask about it, my response would be: "Why would you like to know it?" Any answer to this question is bad. If they do not bail out and stop asking at this point, then I bail out.
The point is that if I want, I can completely change my way of life by switching to a job which pays 50 % of my current salary. Or 400 % of my current salary. It does not matter. What matters is that it is solely my decision and none of my potential future employer's business.
If they want to know my current salary, it is a red flag. I do not care about them knowing it, but there is a high risk that they will use that information to try to make an offer which they think that I ought to consider good. They can offer e.g. my current salary + their negotiating margin and think "hey, we have offered you more than you have now, so you ought to be happy". While in reality, the only person who can responsibly decide whether I am happy about it or not is me.
Note that I am not criticizing companies which want to hire for cheap. This is all right. But they need to do it transparently, from the beginning. They should say it clearly and upfront: for this position, our budget is somewhere in this range ... are you interested or not? This is a fair way to go.
There's a case to be made for an employee protection preventing an employer from firing an employee for refusing to produce pay stubs from a past employer. However, I've said it before -- preventing a question from being asked is state overreach and constitutes a violation of the first amendment, in my opinion.
So people on HN are pro employers posting their employee salaries publicly but against previous companies asking what their salaries are. WTF. I must be missing something here.
I personally believe your salary is your business. Period. Getting salary information bad, forcing employees to divulge salaries from a position of power is disgusting.
Companies asking for your previous salary means theyre going to try to pay you with your past salary being a benchmark to work with, not necessarily what the position is worth.
Companies posting employee salaries publicly aims for employees at said company to be paid at the same level (with similar experience).
There's a subtle difference.
Every time I've been asked about salary its been an obvious ploy to lowball my salary due to previous experience of working in a lower cost area. Employees literally have zero incentive not to lie, since employers can't verify
"So [some] people on HN are pro employers posting their employee salaries publicly but [some people on HN are] against previous companies asking what their salaries are. WTF. I must be missing something here."
I added some words to your quote in the square brackets that should resolve the confusion for you.
I'm not sure how effective this will be. When I was recruiting It got to the point where I would never ask salary's I would just say, "I'm assume your currently making between XXk and XXk?" and 9 times out of 10 I was in the right range. 1 time out of 10 they would say no and correct me. I just took a educated guess based on knowing the market. Any good recruiter should be able to do the same.
The bill also makes it illegal to "rely on the salary history of an applicant in determining the salary, benefits or other compensation for such applicant during the hiring process, including the negotiation of a contract" even if you find out without asking.
This is the #1 rule I always tell people who are interviewing for a new job. Never tell a potential employer your past job salary, especially so if you are unhappy with that salary.
When my girlfriend was interviewing for a new job two years ago we talked about this because the recruiter was very demanding about knowing what her current salary was and I told her to stay firm on it because the salary in her current job was, frankly, shit. In the end she got a 50% pay increase over her previous job and then six months later got promoted with a pay increase that effectively doubled her salary from her previous job. Which brings me to another point- a lot of people will justify disclosing the amount by reasoning that they can always ask for a raise after they get hired and the important thing is to get a foot in the door. The problem is that anchoring is a very real thing. If you start at $50k instead of a $75k, every raise you get at that company for the rest of your career will be based off that first salary. If you stay at a company for 10-15 years, that is an enormous difference that could be well into the six figures.
Bottom line, don't disclose salary history to employers. You'll seldom find an employer who will tell you what your colleagues in the same job make. Why do you want to show your hand?
As for this law, I'm actually mildly opposed to it. I don't think that the government should have a hand in determining salary beyond minimum wage, because that is an agreement made between two consenting parties in private industry. If you are a more experienced negotiator and are willing to ask for more money than your counterparts, why shouldn't you be at an advantage? There's no law that says you have to disclose it and the rest is up to you.
I recently interviewed with a prominent Drupal company, Forum One, and was shocked that they not only asked for my previous salary, but previous 3 salaries and also wanted me to verify them with pay stubs! I told them no and the interview stalled after that. That was a sad day, I really wanted to work with them but what they asked for was unacceptable.
They were not in New York but I welcome this law everywhere.
They are trying to pass this in Philadelphia in May. Comcast and the local Chamber of Commerce are suing to stop it citing that it's a Freedom of Speech violation.
Besides being able to freely low ball candidates who started behind the 8 ball (women/minorities/people who didn't go to elite schools), is there a real argument for companies HAVING to know your previous salary?
The analogy is not perfect, but all the time people like to know how much a house or car sold for in the past, or how much a stock traded for the in past, etc. Seems like useful data.
Now, I'm not advocating for or against this particular question, but I sure do hope there is data collected and studied on the effect this has in NY before anyone jumps to conclusions. I feel it's too easy to have a knee-jerk reaction on this one.
There is no way to know whether this helps/hurts/is neutral for any particular class of people without studying its effects.
A lot of the analogies and reasoning I'm reading here is faulty. Nothing stops HR depts. from sharing information which to a first degree of approximation would give them an idea of the market rate for the positions they're filling. Companies are already free to rescind offers if they find out that you've lied about aspects of your past work history. It's part of what at-will employment is. This is about interfering with the negotiation of the individual job seeker. If I can't ask for your salary history, then I might miss out on the competitive advantage you as a candidate have in that you're willing to work for less over potentially more qualified people as you build your skill-set and expertise. The right way to help those who are taken advantage of is education about how to bargain and what information they need and need not share, not legislation.
Here in India, you are not only asked your previous salary, you have to provide your last (sometimes three) payslip while joining. Some companies have a policy of NOT giving more than a 30% hike from your previous salary - you need top management approval for such a hike.
At the time of joining - is usually for background verification. Most companies don't even care what your last pay was. Even if you are paid higher, they are going to play in their range.
However, during negotiation, if you lied about your previous pay just to get a better hike - you would get flagged, may get fired and get yourself listed into an unofficial blacklist. Its more of an ethics issue than just a pay mismatch.
> Some companies have a policy of NOT giving more than a 30% hike from your previous salary
These companies are telling you "loud and clear" - "we don't care about talent".
There are other companies that would pay "fairly" as per their bands - even if that means a 100-200% hike
Do you plan to have children in the near future? Are you currently pregnant? Do you prefer men or women as romantic/sexual partners? How old are you? What religion were you raised with? Do you currently attend a church?
>Why is this information legal to acquire when I'm wearing my business hat vs when I'm wearing my friend hat?
You tell me....
I'll have to find some way to bring it up myself. A higher than usual salary history is a good tangible signal to future employers and I'm not going to give it up.
[+] [-] pmoriarty|9 years ago|reply
Most employers don't ask, and the few that have (perhaps by having a part of an employment form ask for previous salary) have never made my leaving that information out an issue.
Most recruiters, if they even ask, respect my decision not to talk about it, but I've been pressed hard on this by a handful of recruiters, and have had this be a deal breaker for a couple of them. One recruiting firm admitted that they were paid by the employers to get this information. I wasn't getting paid to give this information out, however, and it's worth more to me to keep it private as I'm placed at a disadvantage in negotiations if I name a number first.
It's still a seller's market for IT talent, and there are plenty of other fish in the sea, so if some recruiters can't accept that I won't name a number, it's their loss.
It's great that NYC is taking the lead on this, and I really hope the rest of the US follows suit.
[+] [-] louisswiss|9 years ago|reply
> I'm placed at a disadvantage in negotiations if I name a number first.
... This is unlikely to be true. Generally, in price negotiations it is advantageous to name a number first. This is known as anchoring and basically the theory is that the end result is better for you if the company has to wheedle you down from 170k than if they anchor the price at 100k and you have to argue them up from there.
Plus, it saves a lot of wasted negotiation time on both sides if your price is just way too high for the company and this is clear from the beginning.
(edit: I'm talking about expected salary in general, not disclosing your current salary level)
[+] [-] komali2|9 years ago|reply
her: "Just so we have an idea of your range..."
me: "I understand why that information would be helpful to you, but I can assure you that if everything else is a good fit, salary is the last place we'll find ourselves disagreeing."
Back and forth. Eventually I had to just cut her off and let her know it wasn't a good fit.
I've never had a problem winning the "give us your number" battle before, I honestly have to admire the tenacity of that recruiter. Seems like Ticketmaster genuinely cannot hire without getting that information.
[+] [-] ryandrake|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: Also I kind of disagree with your assessment that it's a "seller's market" for IT talent. A lot of companies appear to be fishing for good deals, but is there really that much actual hiring going on? A lot of companies saying they're looking for talent does not a hot job market make.
[+] [-] sitkack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peripitea|9 years ago|reply
I don't normally like to lie, but I see no moral issue with it in a situation like this where the system is intentionally rigged against you. They are systematically depriving people of pay; I'm not going to lose sleep over a small lie that rights that wrong.
[+] [-] manyxcxi|9 years ago|reply
I've got a business partner (came from high on up in the land of the big four) that during a salary negotiation of our own he floated the idea of asking for our candidate's current salary, AND PROOF. Apparently over 'there', especially as you get higher up, it's completely commonplace. Having spent his whole career over there, it didn't occur to him that maybe people would rather just walk away from your company simply for asking than to answer the question.
Luckily, he's a great guy and after my half hour soap box tirade he came around to realizing that in an environment where people are _actually_ practicing a craft and have what would resemble real skills[0], they don't put up with it.
- [0] Not to say people working for the big megacorp accounting firms don't have real skills, but no, yeah, that's actually what I meant. I kid, I kid.
[+] [-] mcv|9 years ago|reply
But freelancing is a different market than salaried employment. I think for salaried positions it's up to the employer to be open about their pay range.
[+] [-] josho|9 years ago|reply
If the recruiter asks repeatedly, a trick that I learned is to answer that it's in your employee confidentiality agreement not to discuss the terms of your employment. It's arguably a true statement as well (in case you were concerned about telling a white lie)--your employer could be considering your salary as confidential because they obviously haven't disclosed it publicly, so you are taking a very conservative approach on the confidentiality terms in most contracts.
edit: the statement doesn't need to be legally defensible, it gives you an opportunity to redirect and ask what they are willing to pay for the position or to learn about their benefits package.
[+] [-] scarmig|9 years ago|reply
Or is this purely theoretical and not seen in practice?
[+] [-] dboat|9 years ago|reply
Do you recall any specific responses you've made to that question which allowed you to avoid answering it but still yielded positive results?
[+] [-] jgalt212|9 years ago|reply
That's great for you, but a prospective employer refused to put an official offer package together for me until they had proof of my recent salary.
And no, there weren't other contemporaneous offers on the table at the time, nor were there other employers in my industry whose practices greatly differed from above.
In short, I think this a great consumer protection rule. Not really consumer, but little guy/girl protection rule.
[+] [-] collyw|9 years ago|reply
If I disclose my salary early it saves a lot of time wasting though it probably limits what I can ask for or will be offered.
[+] [-] callmeed|9 years ago|reply
Is it more of a privacy/principle? Or do you actually lose an edge in salary negotiations by revealing it?
[+] [-] _pmf_|9 years ago|reply
You answer it by accepting an offer or giving a ballpark number for negotiations.
[+] [-] OJFord|9 years ago|reply
In the UK, they don't need to.
> It's great that NYC is taking the lead on this, and I really hope the rest of the US follows suit.
There's a lot of positive remarks in this thread, that I don't really understand. I see the advantage if your current salary is unusually low, but it cuts both ways: without knowledge of the company, (and within an industry) salary contains more information than job title.
[+] [-] cordite|9 years ago|reply
I very much doubt that many organizations do this, though I have experienced it myself.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] najati83|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] always_good|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulddraper|9 years ago|reply
How do you rectify this with constitutionally protected free speech?
Is freedom of speech meant only for the little guy?
[+] [-] showmethemoney|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garethsprice|9 years ago|reply
However, helping friends apply to jobs in other industries - specifically medical - I saw that most of the applications involved filling out an automated form that required prior salary information to complete.
There's no advantage to an employee from being forced to disclose this information and it perpetuates compensation discrepancies by gender/race/guts to ask. Very glad to see this made illegal.
Now, if they were really serious about fixing pay discrepancies, they'd make it mandatory to post salary ranges with job listings.
[+] [-] jimparkins|9 years ago|reply
Even now I hesitate to write this as a million people will come out and say never lie - what if they found out.
More than banning. There needs to be acceptance that if someone asks you. You are totally free to make any damn number up that you like. Seriously. Its a sales situation. It should not be like your under oath on the stand. Which is how most people view it.
[+] [-] mdb333|9 years ago|reply
I wonder if this ban addresses background checks covering the same information, because some companies do ask for this data from previous employers although not all provide it. Without protection there this ban seems fairly limited.
Anyhow, I don't agree with all advice to never disclose current/previous salary. In some scenarios certainly it makes sense, but in others it is the opposite. You want to justify a higher market value and set the expectation that you're unlikely to be interested unless they're willing to compensate at $X or higher. Of course it's different in terms of leverage if you're employed currently or not. Recruiters and interviewers will waste tons of your time if you don't get on the same page quickly. Lack of transparency around your compensation expectations will exacerbate this issue. Whether that means you tell them what you're making or what you'd like to make doesn't really matter, but you better do at least one of the two.
[+] [-] komali2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbasista|9 years ago|reply
The point is that if I want, I can completely change my way of life by switching to a job which pays 50 % of my current salary. Or 400 % of my current salary. It does not matter. What matters is that it is solely my decision and none of my potential future employer's business.
If they want to know my current salary, it is a red flag. I do not care about them knowing it, but there is a high risk that they will use that information to try to make an offer which they think that I ought to consider good. They can offer e.g. my current salary + their negotiating margin and think "hey, we have offered you more than you have now, so you ought to be happy". While in reality, the only person who can responsibly decide whether I am happy about it or not is me.
Note that I am not criticizing companies which want to hire for cheap. This is all right. But they need to do it transparently, from the beginning. They should say it clearly and upfront: for this position, our budget is somewhere in this range ... are you interested or not? This is a fair way to go.
[+] [-] paulcole|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lend000|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ransom1538|9 years ago|reply
I personally believe your salary is your business. Period. Getting salary information bad, forcing employees to divulge salaries from a position of power is disgusting.
Here is me being publicly quartered on HN for pushing back on forcing employees publicly posting salaries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12805814
[+] [-] kesselvon|9 years ago|reply
Companies posting employee salaries publicly aims for employees at said company to be paid at the same level (with similar experience).
There's a subtle difference.
Every time I've been asked about salary its been an obvious ploy to lowball my salary due to previous experience of working in a lower cost area. Employees literally have zero incentive not to lie, since employers can't verify
[+] [-] jerf|9 years ago|reply
I added some words to your quote in the square brackets that should resolve the confusion for you.
[+] [-] AlwaysRock|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burkaman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkrich|9 years ago|reply
When my girlfriend was interviewing for a new job two years ago we talked about this because the recruiter was very demanding about knowing what her current salary was and I told her to stay firm on it because the salary in her current job was, frankly, shit. In the end she got a 50% pay increase over her previous job and then six months later got promoted with a pay increase that effectively doubled her salary from her previous job. Which brings me to another point- a lot of people will justify disclosing the amount by reasoning that they can always ask for a raise after they get hired and the important thing is to get a foot in the door. The problem is that anchoring is a very real thing. If you start at $50k instead of a $75k, every raise you get at that company for the rest of your career will be based off that first salary. If you stay at a company for 10-15 years, that is an enormous difference that could be well into the six figures.
Bottom line, don't disclose salary history to employers. You'll seldom find an employer who will tell you what your colleagues in the same job make. Why do you want to show your hand?
As for this law, I'm actually mildly opposed to it. I don't think that the government should have a hand in determining salary beyond minimum wage, because that is an agreement made between two consenting parties in private industry. If you are a more experienced negotiator and are willing to ask for more money than your counterparts, why shouldn't you be at an advantage? There's no law that says you have to disclose it and the rest is up to you.
[+] [-] s73ver|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aglavine|9 years ago|reply
To get a better salary and better work conditions cannot depend of hiding a figure. It is a weak position, to say the least.
[+] [-] ElijahLynn|9 years ago|reply
I recently interviewed with a prominent Drupal company, Forum One, and was shocked that they not only asked for my previous salary, but previous 3 salaries and also wanted me to verify them with pay stubs! I told them no and the interview stalled after that. That was a sad day, I really wanted to work with them but what they asked for was unacceptable.
They were not in New York but I welcome this law everywhere.
[+] [-] pixl97|9 years ago|reply
You assumed you wanted to work with them based on a false idea of what that company was. It sounds like you lucked out.
[+] [-] southphillyman|9 years ago|reply
Besides being able to freely low ball candidates who started behind the 8 ball (women/minorities/people who didn't go to elite schools), is there a real argument for companies HAVING to know your previous salary?
[+] [-] mbroshi|9 years ago|reply
Now, I'm not advocating for or against this particular question, but I sure do hope there is data collected and studied on the effect this has in NY before anyone jumps to conclusions. I feel it's too easy to have a knee-jerk reaction on this one.
There is no way to know whether this helps/hurts/is neutral for any particular class of people without studying its effects.
[+] [-] lr4444lr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arunitc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anupshinde|9 years ago|reply
However, during negotiation, if you lied about your previous pay just to get a better hike - you would get flagged, may get fired and get yourself listed into an unofficial blacklist. Its more of an ethics issue than just a pay mismatch.
> Some companies have a policy of NOT giving more than a 30% hike from your previous salary These companies are telling you "loud and clear" - "we don't care about talent".
There are other companies that would pay "fairly" as per their bands - even if that means a 100-200% hike
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Ultramax|9 years ago|reply
Then for the employer, will you decrease the salary to match previous low rates or wages? Or will you pay him/her the market rate regardless?
Personally, I have always been asked how much I made at previous places. I prefer to give a range than specify individually.
[+] [-] crazy1van|9 years ago|reply
I could ask my buddy how much he made at his last job.
I couldn't ask my buddy how much he made at his last job if I'm considering hiring him to work at my company.
Why is this information legal to acquire when I'm wearing my business hat vs when I'm wearing my friend hat?
[+] [-] dikdik|9 years ago|reply
>Why is this information legal to acquire when I'm wearing my business hat vs when I'm wearing my friend hat? You tell me....
[+] [-] s73ver|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdulli|9 years ago|reply