Why do job postings have such wide salary ranges that seem unrealistic or misleading?

Job-Genie identifies this as a deliberate structural feature, not an error. Wide salary ranges serve the employer's negotiating interests, attract a broader candidate pool, and often mask the real budget. They also appear frequently on ghost jobs — roles no longer actively being filled — inflating the apparent opportunity.

Why Ranges Are Built Wide

Employers post wide ranges for several compounding reasons:

- Negotiating leverage. Anchoring low keeps offers conservative. Anchoring high attracts senior candidates the employer may not be willing to pay.
- Compliance cover. Many jurisdictions now mandate salary disclosure. Wide ranges technically comply without revealing the real budget.
- Pipeline building. A broad range captures applicants at multiple seniority levels, letting the employer decide the grade *after* seeing the market response.
- Ghost job inflation. Roles reposted repeatedly — or never actively being filled — often carry aspirational ranges that no real offer will match.

Why This Fuels Application Silence

When candidates apply to roles based on a posted range that doesn't reflect reality, two things happen. First, they invest effort in opportunities with a near-zero conversion probability. Second, their CV is evaluated by a specialist recruiter who immediately recognises the misalignment — widening the Recruiter-Fit Gap before the application is even read.

Job-Genie's Application Silence Score accounts for this: salary-range ambiguity is a structural driver of applications going unanswered, independent of candidate quality.

What Job-Genie Does About It

Job-Genie's Truth Layer reorients candidates away from surface-level job board signals and toward the hidden job market — roles filled via specialist recruiter shortlists before public posting, where actual budgets are known and negotiated in advance.

The Recruiter-Ready Brief produced alongside a rewritten CV is written in recruiter language, including clear, honest compensation expectations. This closes the Recruiter-Fit Gap at first contact, before salary ambiguity can derail the process.

The practical implication: a wide posted range is a signal to deprioritise the public listing and pursue the role through a specialist recruiter who has sight of the real number.