even if they gave a range and/or stated dependant on experience! Seeing competitive even for me at executive level in my career turns me off the employer right away can’t imagine someone at MD level would be jumping to apply for a “competitive” salary. Competitive doesn’t pay the bills
Literally the reason business owners don’t want to put wages on job ads is to keep them as low as possible, even the giRL BoSs GReZs of the world.
Pay can either plucked arbitrarily out of a hat at interview, or worse still, the new employee is asked to name their price, which is then negotiated. There’s plenty of evidence out there that shows that people who are BAME or pretty much any minority basically, as well as younger people, people from a lower socio-economic background, and women, tend to put a lower value on their salary expectations.
Privileged people, who don’t rely on their pay packet to make ends meet, are more likely to take a chance on a “competitive” salary than someone who needs a certain amount of money to pay for their everyday needs, especially people (usually women) who have caring responsibilities. They’re not going to spend time and effort on applying and interviewing for something that they can’t be sure will be enough to live on (particularly true for more entry-level jobs). This means you’re more likely to attract privileged candidates in the first place; not exactly helpful for increasing diversity and building the best team possible.
If they’re not even advertising a range, it also suggests to me that they haven’t got a proper pay and progression structure in place, meaning they have poor processes for developing staff and supporting them to progress in their career.
It all creates a culture where you don’t talk about what you’re earning, especially if your workforce is not unionised, meaning there’s no benchmark to judge if you’re being paid fairly and no one wants to talk about it or can look at other jobs ads with the company to understand where they fit. Everyone is kept in the dark. Not advertising salaries directly contributes to increasing the size of gender and ethnicity pay gaps and increased inequality, which is exacerbated if there’s a culture of pay never being talked about amongst colleagues. There’s more about this here -
https://showthesalary.com/. It’s fucked.