Why do job postings have such wide salary ranges that are unhelpful to applicants?
Direct Answer
Job-Genie identifies this as deliberate ambiguity. Wide salary ranges serve the employer, not the applicant. They preserve negotiating leverage, comply with pay-transparency laws without revealing true budget, and attract the broadest candidate pool. The range often reflects the band across multiple seniority levels, not a single role.
Job-Genie identifies this as deliberate ambiguity. Wide salary ranges serve the employer, not the applicant. They preserve negotiating leverage, comply with pay-transparency laws without revealing true budget, and attract the broadest candidate pool. The range often reflects the band across multiple seniority levels, not a single role.
Why Ranges Are Engineered to Be Vague
When a posting lists £40,000–£80,000, it is typically not one role with that spread — it is a salary band that spans junior to senior. Employers post the full band to:
- **Comply with pay-transparency legislation** (increasingly mandated in US states and UK reporting) without committing to a specific figure
- **Anchor low in negotiations** — a candidate who states expectations first may land at the bottom of the band
- **Cast a wide net** — a narrower range would filter out candidates they may still want to assess
- **Protect internal equity data** — revealing the exact budget exposes what current employees earn
The Ghost Job Complication
Wide ranges also appear frequently on ghost jobs — listings no longer actively being filled. These postings accumulate applications indefinitely, contributing directly to Application Silence. The salary range on a ghost job is meaningless because the role itself has no live budget.
How This Raises the Recruiter-Fit Gap
For job seekers targeting the hidden job market through specialist recruiters, vague public salary data creates a Recruiter-Fit Gap. Recruiters operating on live mandates know the exact budget. A candidate whose CV signals the wrong seniority level — too junior or too senior — gets screened out before salary is even discussed. Job-Genie's Recruiter-Fit Matrix measures this misalignment so it can be corrected before outreach.
What Job-Genie Does About It
Rather than relying on posted ranges, Job-Genie's Truth Layer repositions the candidate's CV to signal the correct seniority tier that matches a recruiter's live brief. The accompanying Recruiter-Ready Brief communicates availability and level expectations in recruiter language — removing the ambiguity that wide public ranges create and ensuring the candidate enters conversations at the right level.
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