LinkedIn Users Will Soon Know What Jobs Pay Before Applying for Them (adweek.com)

LinkedIn just introduced a way to help its members avoid going through the interview process for jobs with salaries that do not meet their expectations. From a report: The professional network announced the rollout of Salary Insights, which will add estimated or expected salary ranges to open roles, getting the numbers either through salary ranges provided by employers or estimated ranges from data submitted by members. The feature will launch "in the coming weeks." Salary Insights marks the next step after LinkedIn Salary, which the professional network launched in November 2016 to provide its users with information on salaries, bonuses and equity data for specific job titles, as well as factors that impact those salaries, including experience, industry, company size, location and education level.

Comments

LinkedIn gaining relevance

[ArtemaOne]

This could be a pretty big change for LinkedIn. I forsee more people using it. I also think it could make corporations be wary and start using other services.

Re:LinkedIn gaining relevance

[Freischutz]

This could be a pretty big change for LinkedIn. I forsee more people using it. I also think it could make corporations be wary and start using other services.

You ask me this feature would be a big relief. It is such enormous fun to be made to jump through all the flaming interview hoops only to find out that you are expected to work for a totally unacceptable salary. However, there are other tricks that employers use like offering a flat salary while they retain the option to make you work over time and weekends whenever they want to. At this one place I applied for a job they asked me how well I worked under pressure, I told them I'd finished a Comp Sci degree in the top ten percent of my year, what did they think? Then I asked the HR type: Why do you ask? Will I be spending a lot of time working under pressure? He was not amused. So just some hints for those of you who are just starting out:

1) If they want you to work for a flat salary with no ceiling on working time and promise it will only be the occasional evening and weekend work only in emergencies that is HR speak for: "We are planning to put you on permanent 24/7 standby without paying you extra for it."
2) If anybody ever asks you during a job interview if you work well under pressure that is HR speak for: "We are running our company's operations with a skeleton crew to maximise profits, we are always on the verge of missing deadlines and you can expect to be worked to death"

Also watch out for clauses in the contract that prohibit you from working for anybody else in the industry for N years after quitting at their company. Some employers even add clauses forbidding you to work on any FOSS projects at all. That is bad because FOSS projects are a good way to satisfy the kind of employer that wants you to provide code samples. I'm fine with code samples but I usually don't waste my time on perspective employers who send me math puzzles since I have yet to be offered a job solving math puzzles. One outfit I worked for even tried to get me to sign a new contract that contained a clause so broadly worded that they could have claimed ownership of *any* code I wrote, even on my own time outside of working hours and even if it was unrelated to their business. I'm not going to attribute malice to this, that contract was probably just written by a really incompetent lawyer whose chief qualification was being related to one of the managers but I still refused to sign the damn thing. Now if Linked-in would add a feature that allows me to see shit like this it would make my life even easier than knowing in advance what they are planning to pay me.

Re:LinkedIn gaining relevance

[dgatwood]

Also watch out for clauses in the contract that prohibit you from working for anybody else in the industry for N years after quitting at their company.

This is one reason why it's good to be in California, where those clauses are always explicitly illegal.

Some employers even add clauses forbidding you to work on any FOSS projects at all. That is bad because FOSS projects are a good way to satisfy the kind of employer that wants you to provide code samples.

Most people don't regularly write open source software, so if an employer wants you to provide code samples, IMO that's a big red flag; it means that one of the following is probably true:

• They are trying to steal other companies' code.
• They are trying to dodge age discrimination laws by asking for something that only new college hires can realistically provide.
• They are completely incompetent.

Any of these things is a fairly strong indication that you really don't want to work there.

Yawn...

[Freischutz]

LinkedIn Users Will Soon Know What Jobs Pay Before Applying for Them

That's nice but what pisses me off the most about job interviews is not that, its being asked to a job interview and having a conversation something akin to the following:

Interviewer: We are looking to replace Bob who left us recently. We are looking for a somebody who know <long list of APIs> and has recently worked on <insanely specific project description>, we really need a close fit on this.
Me: No, if I had it would say so in my CV.
Interviewer: So, do you know Microsoft .NET
Me: No, if I did it would say so in my CV.
Interviewer: Do you have any Microsoft programming experience.
Me: No, if I had it would say so in my CV, in fact it says in my CV I have 10 years of Linux system programming experienece in C/C++.
Interviewer: Well I must say I'm rather disappointed, why did you even apply here?
Me: I was sent here by the person at the recruiting office who told me you wanted to interview me for a job because my CV matched what you were looking for.
Interviewer: Well, ... it seems your skill profile is incompatible with our requirements.
Me: No shit stupid, **which my the common sense processor in my brain modifies to: This is true**.
Interviewer: Looks at his laptop screen and types something.
Me: Can I ask you something?
Interviewer: Sure, shoot?
Me: Did you even read my CV?
Interviewer: Scowls and does not answer.

Re:Yawn...

[HornWumpus]

You both got fucked by idiotic paper pushers. You by your 'recruiter' he by his HR drone.

He hadn't seen your resume until the interview started. HR had assured him, they had prefiltered for qualified applicants (read: 'filtered _out_ all qualified applicants').

HR is useless, recruiters are useless, but you know that. _All_ qualified applicants and good jobs are matched via the side door end runs around HR.

Watch out for recruiters that want to use 'the back door', unless you're into that kind of thing... Some of those bastards will edit your resume (lying for you) before sending them out.

Re:Yawn...

[Freischutz]

You both got fucked by idiotic paper pushers. You by your 'recruiter' he by his HR drone.

He hadn't seen your resume until the interview started. HR had assured him, they had prefiltered for qualified applicants (read: 'filtered _out_ all qualified applicants').

HR is useless, recruiters are useless, but you know that. _All_ qualified applicants and good jobs are matched via the side door end runs around HR.

Watch out for recruiters that want to use 'the back door', unless you're into that kind of thing... Some of those bastards will edit your resume (lying for you) before sending them out.

I disagree, I've had several Job interviews like this and I have two major issues with what happened. Firstly an interviewer should not interview anybody until he has read the CV. It does not take **that** long to read a damn CV. I was quite annoyed at these people for wasting my time by being too lazy to read my CV. Secondly the specification for an exact Bob replacement was so insanely specific it could only have been met if they'd had a backup tape of Bob's brain and then uploaded it into a Bob clone they commissioned from some underground cloning facility in North Korea. The lesson I drew from these experiences is that most employment agencies, head hunters and HR people (with a few notable exceptions) are largely useless in this capacity. I've been interviewed by exactly one HR person who I thought did a really competent job. Other than that the only truly useful job interviews I have had were with the department heads and people I would be working for/with.

Glassdoor

[blackfeltfedora]

Glassdoor already has a big jump on this information, it will be hard for LinkedIn to catch up. In an unrelated story, Microsoft has been screwing up LinkedIn since they bought it, I'm not using LinkedIn to tell business connections "Happy Birthday" or to track celebrity news.

Re:This is bad news

[ShanghaiBill]

All employers will be advertising the lower value ...

Any company that does that will get fewer and lower quality applicants.

Really?

[rnturn]

I just looked at that LI tool and it's pretty sparsely populated. Most of the queries I threw at it had "$0" listed as the going salary. I'm sure it'll get better but for now it's not even as "good" as the salary estimates you get from Glassdoor.

Wait...

[dohzer]

Wait... LinkedIn is for jobs? I always thought it was a game where you have to hit "Accept" for people you know and like, and "Ignore" for the thousands of foreigners you've never met.