Salary History, Should you provide it?

Ah, the $60,000 question.

Combing through the job classifieds (both online and off), I see this from time to time. An absolute mandate to provide a Salary history or you will not be considered for the position.

In the age of information and more specifically the age of a down economy many employers hold this over many applicants to gleen a unfavourable advantage during the salary negotiation phase of a job interview.

In all the resources I have read on Salary Negotiation it has always been mentioned that compensation should never be discussed until a job offer has been extended to the candidate.

But more and more this is the first request that a recruiter always makes and what a employer from time to time will ask for.

This is a hard question to really ask if a job candidate should in fact provide a Salary History. It is impractical for a recruiter or an employer to mandate this request on pain of not even being considered for a interview for the position.

The real anomaly is this. If you provide a Salary history or expectation which is too high then you probably won't even be invited for an interview in the first place. A salary History or expectation that is too low might land you the interview but lock you into a low negotiating price point for the position.

A current theory is this tactic is used to weed out candidates whose price point are not in-line to the budget that the employer has in mind. If a employer is insistent to have this salary information first before any interview or any consideration for the said position, then logic would suggest that the employer is too fixed on seeing the candidate as a expense and not a investment to the companies bottom line.

This request for Salary history or expectation will often backfire on the employer as candidates that know their worth and the value of their skills will typically use this to weed out the employers who made the request in the first place deducing that they do not have a clear idea of what they are looking for (and hence do not understand the value of the skills they are requiring) or they are simply not interested in hiring quality candidates.

At the end of the day, when all of the cards are laid on the table and in play. It should be realised that the reality is you get what you pay for. Employers that will not even consider a candidate that does not provide Salary history or expectation should be heavily scrutinised by the candidate.

The reason is simple. The employer certainly has a budget in mind and that budget is most likely derived from market rates that are freely researchable by both a smart employer and a savvy candidate. Employers and candidates that either don't research these or are not aware of them will have a diminished capacity to fully understand the value of what both parties can provide for each other and until they do both can just be one big expense to the bottom line.