Why hiding the salary in a job advert wastes everyone's time

6 minute read · 2026-08-28

Open any job board and you will find adverts offering a competitive salary, a salary dependent on experience, or an attractive package. None of those phrases contains information. They are placeholders where a number should be, and they cost the employer applications and the candidate hours. This is a look at why employers do it, why it rarely works, and what to write instead.

What candidates actually do when the pay is missing

Faced with an advert with no salary, most people do one of three things. Some skip it entirely and apply to the advert next to it that states a figure. Some assume the worst and skip it for that reason. A minority apply anyway, and a share of those discover at interview, or at offer, that the pay was never going to work.

Each of those outcomes is bad for the employer. The first two shrink the applicant pool, and the people most likely to skip are the ones with options, which is precisely the group being recruited for. The third burns time on both sides.

The arithmetic is easy to check for yourself. Suppose you interview six people for one vacancy. Each interview takes an hour of a manager's time, plus half an hour of preparation and notes, and two people are involved in each one. That is eighteen hours of paid management time before you count the arranging, the travel, the room, and the candidates' own time. If two of those six were never going to accept the salary on offer, six hours of that went nowhere, and both of those candidates now think slightly less of the business.

Why employers leave it out

The reasons are usually genuine, and each has a better answer than silence.

• Fear of unsettling existing staff. This is the most honest reason and the most revealing one. If publishing the going rate for a role would cause a problem internally, the problem already exists and your team will find out anyway, because your advert is public.
• Wanting to see what candidates will accept. This mostly filters for people who negotiate confidently rather than people who do the job well, and it tends to widen pay gaps between groups.
• Genuine uncertainty about the level. Fair enough, but that is an argument for publishing a band with the criteria that move you through it, not for publishing nothing.

What to publish instead

If you are writing the advert, four lines fix most of it.

1. A real range with a real top. Say £30,000 to £34,000 and mean it. Advertising a wide band and always appointing at the bottom teaches candidates not to believe you.
2. What moves someone through the band. A ticket, a qualification, years of experience, a shift pattern, a language. This gives applicants a way to place themselves, and it makes your decision defensible later.
3. The shape of the money. Hourly or annual, contracted hours, whether overtime is paid or at what rate, shift premiums, bonus and how it is calculated, pension contribution, holiday, and any allowance for travel or tools.
4. The location and the pattern.

Where a role is genuinely paid at the statutory floor, state the actual hourly rate rather than writing that you pay the minimum wage, because those rates change every April and an advert that just cites the legal minimum tells applicants nothing about whether you pay above it. The current rates are published on GOV.UK.

If you are the candidate looking at a blank salary line

Do not treat the omission as a reason to give up, but do get the number early. Ask before the first interview, by email, in one plain sentence: could you tell me the salary range for this role, so I can be sure we are aligned before we both invest time. That question is entirely normal, and an employer who is offended by it has told you something useful.

If you are asked for your salary expectations first, answer with a range based on what similar roles in your area are advertised at, and tie it to the responsibilities described in the advert. Avoid quoting your current salary as the anchor, because it prices your next job against your last one rather than against the work.

The point of the number

A salary line in an advert is not a negotiating weakness. It is a filter that works in both directions, doing free work for the employer by removing people who would decline, and free work for the candidate by removing applications that were never going to end well. Publishing it is the cheapest improvement most job adverts can make.

Next step: if you are hiring, put a figure in your next advert and see what happens to the response. If you are job hunting, our job listings and browse pages are the place to start, and our advice section covers how to handle the salary conversation at interview.