"Between $90,000 and $900,000": how Netflix and Tesla bypass the law that requires salary to be given in job offers

When a person looks for a job, they must face numerous obstacles. Some may be the competition with the rest of the people who apply for the same job offer, the correct writing of the curriculum vitae that is sent to the job offers, the conduct of the interview and the selection tests and the management of stress and expectations throughout this process.

In addition, the omission of salary in job offers constitutes another obstacle that especially affects women. In this sense, the US state of California currently requires companies to specify specific or estimated remuneration in their job offers. However, certain firms are shrewdly circumventing this requirement.

A salary between $90,000 and $900,000. According to a study recently published by the platform Comprehensive.io, Netflix and Tesla are including very wide annual salary ranges in their job offers. For example, in the first case, an offer A job for the software engineer position is awarded a salary ranging from $90,000 to $900,000 a year. And in the second case, Elon Musk’s firm offers, for a similar positiona salary that ranges from 83,200 to 417,000 dollars per year.

Too wide salary bands. The report has been carried out through the analysis of around 53,000 job offers made by 700 companies in the technology sector, concluding that the average salary range of the offers ranges from 130,000 to 200,000 dollars per year. According to Roger Lee, co-founder of Comprehensive.io, there are companies that deliberately include a “very wide” salary range, a decision that for many people would not be in line with the spirit of the law, according to what he said in statements to Bloomberg.

Job Seekers Perplexed. One of those people is Christie Allen, a member of HashiCorp’s Human Resources team, who posted a ‘tweetCriticizing the previously mentioned offer from Netflix: “I saw a job offer for a Software Engineer position at a nice and prestigious organization that proudly displayed a salary range of $90,000 to $900,000. How can that help?”

more obstacles. This is a decision by the firms that hinders the objective of salary transparency, which is to reduce the gender gap. In this sense, as explained by Shelly Holt, head of the Human Resources department at PayScale, in a report published by the BBC in September 2021, transparency favors equal pay since, in general, women do not agree to negotiate a salary and are penalized more harshly when they demand an increase in it.

It’s not the first time. On the other hand, this practice has already been carried out by certain companies in New York, where a salary transparency law has been applied since 2021, some of which offered salary bands with a variation of two million dollars, as reported by Bloomberg last November.

There are companies that are not convinced. However, it is not the only formula that certain firms use to avoid specifying the salary corresponding to their job offers. According to a article published by the BBC in September 2021, some firms such as Johnson & Johnson and Nike, prevented workers from Colorado (whose wage transparency law went into effect earlier that year) from applying for their jobs.

There is no way back. On the other hand, showing an excessively high salary band for a job does not seem to prevent the extension of the salary transparency law. In this sense, Washington will be the next North American state to apply a similar rule, and in Europe, Brussels is working on a law that obliges firms to report salary in job offers, as well as to provide workers with an explanation. on the criteria used to define their remuneration.