“It is time to toss ‘commensurate with experience’. Maybe it once was a good practice, but no longer; hiding salary ranges is a ruinous practice”

It is time to toss “commensurate with experience.” Maybe it once was a good practice, but no longer; hiding salary ranges is a ruinous practice. Shall I count the ways? It allows for gender- and race-based wage gaps to linger and metastasize. It wastes time. It complicates the interview process. It both limits and dilutes the applicant pool. And more fundamentally, claiming that pay is commensurate with experience is pure fiction. Executives don’t post a job without already budgeting for its salary. I have an MBA and ten years of work experience, but you wouldn’t pay me $90k to be an administrative assistant, not due to my aptitude but because your organization probably hasn’t budgeted that much for the role. The salary range is predetermined; the decision to hire is what is based on experience. Listing pay as commensurate with experience is just a poorly veiled lie and that lie has real consequences.

Andrew Fretwell, “Memo to the Board: Kill ‘Commensurate with Experience’”, eJewish Philanthropy (7 March 2017) [http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/memo-to-the-board-kill-commensurate-with-experience/]