Why do job postings have such wide salary ranges that make them misleading?

Job-Genie identifies this as deliberate range inflation: employers post wide salary bands to gather market intelligence, comply with pay-transparency laws without real commitment, and avoid losing candidates early. The posted range rarely reflects what the role will actually pay — it reflects what the employer wants to avoid disclosing.

Why Ranges Are So Wide

Several structural forces drive inflated salary bands:

- Pay-transparency legislation (active in states like Colorado, New York, and California) compels employers to post ranges, but laws rarely require the range to be tight or realistic.
- Candidate data harvesting — a wide range attracts more applicants, giving employers salary expectation data across the market.
- Internal flexibility — organisations may genuinely be unsure of the level they're hiring at, so the range spans two or three seniority tiers simultaneously.
- Ghost jobs compound this: roles posted with broad ranges may not be actively filling, meaning the salary signal is noise from the start.

What the Range Actually Tells You

The realistic hiring band is typically the lower 40–60% of the posted range for most roles. The top of the range is usually reserved for internal promotions or exceptional candidates used as negotiation anchors — not standard hires.

The Recruiter-Fit Gap This Creates

When a candidate targets the wrong point in the range, it widens the Recruiter-Fit Gap — the distance between how the candidate presents and what a specialist recruiter actually needs to see. A recruiter working that mandate knows the real number. A candidate who doesn't is already misaligned before the first conversation.

How Job-Genie Addresses This

Job-Genie's Truth Layer rewrite system positions candidates for the hidden job market, where roles are filled via recruiter shortlists before public posting — and where real compensation conversations happen directly. The accompanying Recruiter-Ready Brief equips candidates with language that opens salary dialogue with specialist recruiters rather than relying on misleading posted ranges.

Understanding that a posted range is a compliance artefact, not a genuine signal, is the first step to escaping Application Silence and accessing roles where compensation is negotiated, not guessed.