Data Shows Salary Transparency Makes Hiring 50% Quicker
A campaign to make salary transparency law launches today, 9th January 2023, by the technology-led talent platform, Liberty Hive, which aims to open debate in the media industry on salary history.
The founders of the platform are encouraging the media industry to list salaries during the recruitment process and when posting job adverts. The campaign calls for a ‘salary reset’ which will increase pay equality and help the media industry solve its skills sets shortage.
The platform is highlighting the benefits of posting salaries on job adverts, reducing the average 3 and a half months it takes to traditionally fill roles in the media industry.
Data from Liberty Hive’s platform has shown it is 50% quicker to fill a job role if a salary or salary band is listed. Similarly, a UK job post that displays a salary receives around 67% more applications than one that does not.
The media industry has been described as “an industry in crisis” with a “talent pool [that] is simply not big enough”.
Joint research from the World Federation of Advertisers and MediaSense in 2021 found “77% of respondents recognised that there is a high or some scarcity of talent in their organisation and 67% of people highlighted how scarcity is proving a major blocker towards growth.”
Liberty Hive argues that the industry should be moving towards greater salary transparency which will ultimately improve the skills sets shortage it is currently experiencing, whilst improving pay equality for women and underrepresented groups.
Failure to list salaries on job adverts as well as asking a candidate’s salary history are two processes that uphold inequality and slow the pace of change, especially for those who’ve been historically underpaid. The campaign is calling for it to become illegal for companies to ask a candidate’s salary history and make it a legal requirement to list salary details on job adverts.
The state of New York is the most recent state in the US that has made salary transparency law (November 2022) but back in 2018, Iceland introduced the first policy in the world that requires companies and institutions with more than 25 employees to prove that they pay men and women equally for a job of equal value. Beginning in 2020, certification became a requirement and companies without certification incur a daily fine. Countries that have taken this step are reporting a narrowing in gender and ethnicity pay gaps by as much as 13%.
In the UK, a salary transparency pilot scheme was launched in March 2022, where participating employers list salary details on job adverts and stop asking about salary history during recruitment. The scheme, run by Baroness Stedman-Scott, indicates that legislation change may also become a reality in the UK soon.
Responses