Hiding the Salary Range Is Not a Strategy

Imagine that you are single. Or, if that feels difficult, imagine that you are deeply unhappy in your current relationship and want a new one.

As a modern person, you naturally put your profile on Tinder-Grindr-whichever, and start looking for potential partners who might be a good fit for you. You find a few. First you go on cautious walking dates. Someone turns out to be a genuinely pleasant person. You go on a second date, and on the third you are already having a long dinner.

Everything seems perfect. On the fifth meeting, after spending hours together, you decide to ask each other the important questions.

You ask: “by the way, are you straight?” They ask: “by the way, are you a woman?”

It turns out that your partner is of the opposite sex from you (as you had hoped), but they are not interested in the opposite sex (unlike what you had hoped). All the effort has turned out to be wasted, and you are back at the starting line, only more depressed than before.

You wonder whether it might have made sense if, say, both people’s genders and sexual orientations had already been visible in the Tinder profile. After all, they are fairly static and predictable factors, and if they miss the mark, they are quite likely to stop the pairing process immediately.

Pairing up is already hard. Let’s not make it unnecessarily hard.

The example above was absurd and obviously untrue. Even so, a similar situation repeats itself daily in job seekers’ lives.

They, too, are looking for one of the most important relationships of their lives: employment. They want to commit to their new relationship fully and for the long term. There are many moving parts in whether the relationship is a good fit, things one has to think through alone and with a potential employer: culture, ways of working, location, responsibilities, freedoms. Big things, but usually things that can be adjusted and negotiated.

Salary, on the other hand, is often a variable with limited flexibility - especially when the differences are measured in thousands of euros per month. A job seeker usually has a minimum amount for which they are willing to do the job, and an employer often has a maximum amount it makes sense to pay for the work.

Despite this, the information is usually not available.

It does not have to be that way. An employer can simply publish its salary range in the job ad and trust that the candidate’s salary requirement falls within that same range.

An exception to this is when a candidate sends an open application and no actual position exists yet. If it is not yet clear what role, if any, the person might be hired for, then no salary range has been defined in advance either. Even then, there is no point in staying silent about expectations for long; an open conversation should begin as early as possible.

The EU’s new pay transparency directive

The directive must be implemented nationally by 7 June 2026 at the latest. Its purpose is to increase transparency around pay levels, especially in order to eliminate gender pay gaps. The rule does not literally force companies to publish a salary range in the job ad, but it strongly steers them toward doing so.

Even employers who decide not to publish the salary in the recruitment ad are still obliged to provide the salary range as soon as possible, proactively, without the applicant having to ask for it. So there is no reason not to put it directly in the ad.

The directive’s reporting obligations apply to companies with more than 100 employees, but the recruitment-related pay transparency requirements apply, in practice, to all employers.

Why hiding the salary range does not benefit the employer

An employer may easily think that with cunning and cleverness it can get a better candidate for less money. But everyone has some hard lower limit they will not move below. That limit varies depending on life situation, but the position is open right now. If the employer’s unspoken salary ceiling is below the candidate’s lower limit, no amount of cleverness will produce a successful hire.

In addition, recruiting based on guesswork and fragile hopes is inefficient and laborious, and it does not scale.

Even in the rare cases where a competent person is hired below market price, perhaps because of the applicant’s desperate life situation, the attachment is unlikely to be long-lasting or successful. And because a new hire always costs much more than salary alone (onboarding, tools, colleagues’ support, and so on), bad attachments are not worth making, even if they come cheap.

What the employer gains by publishing the salary range

In many roles, each position receives dozens or hundreds of applications. This is likely the result of both a rather weak labor market and the ease that AI has brought to creating applications. Therefore, if and when the employer has limits it will not easily move on (such as a salary ceiling), those limits should simply be written openly in the ad. This allows the employer to reject a huge number of unsuitable applicants immediately, without reading a single unnecessary application.

This saves everyone’s time and improves the accuracy of the whole process. Every applicant whose salary expectation exceeds the employer’s ability to pay is a wasted process for both sides.

Hiding the salary range is not a strategy. It is inefficiency that has, until now, been socially acceptable.