"Salary commensurate with experience"
My niece holding a smushed penny for the camera because she understands the value of financial transparency.
There’s this phrase that nonprofits love to add to job listings - “salary commensurate with experience.” I’m not sure where this phrase came from, I assume some very clever marketer who was tasked with coming up with a phrase that makes you *sound* generous but gives you the option to not be if you don’t wanna. It has become my (current, give me 20 minutes and I’ll find a new one) bane of existence.
While this saying is technically true, I suppose - salaries are generally somewhat negotiable based on your level of experience - we* all know you** know how much you want to spend on a position. We know how nonprofits work - there are finite resources to be spread around, especially if you’re an organization heavily funded by programmatic grants. There may not a hard number but there’s a range. We also know it’s not a huge range! Probably within $5,000. Maybe $10,000. Moreover you, job description writer, know whether or not the job you posted is a $50,000 role or a $100,000 role. Besides, under “Qualifications” (or “Experience” or whatever other phrase you used to denote such things) you probably listed how many years of experience you expect the applicants to have.
So - stay with me for a minute - let’s presuppose that the people who are applying for the job are generally in that experience level. Given that very reasonable assumption - don’t you know basically what you can pay? Can’t we just call a spade a spade?
Even worse are the job listings who require that you list your preferred salary in the initial application or else be disqualified.
And anyone who demands you list your most recent salary should be excommunicated.
Here’s a list of reasons why not posting salaries on job listings is bad:
It wastes everyone’s time. It wastes the time of the applicants for whom the actual salary is untenable/unacceptable and it wastes the time of the hiring mangers who have to vet and then talk to the people who would have otherwise never applied.
It promotes inequity. By demanding that people who have generally been marginalized (women, people of color, disabled people) set the terms on how much money they expect to be paid means buying into a system that regularly undervalues these peoples’ work. They may think their value is far less than it is because that is what they have been taught. And you are exploiting that by allowing them to get paid less than what they are worth because it’ll be less expensive to you with the excuse that they said it first so it’s not your fault.
It allows nonprofits to promulgate the theory that transparency is bad and if we admitted how much we were actually spending it would destroy us all. Without actually admitting our realities - that we are paying far less than we wish we did or that we are paying far more than our counterparts or what the actual norms of the sector are in the first place - we will never be able to get the systemic changes that are required to make philanthropy more radical and nonprofits more stable.
It annoys the hell out of people who are applying to jobs and just want to know any kind of range to make sure that we’re all, generally, on the same page. (Some of the more maddening cases here are ones where in the job description there is a demonstrated interest in transparency - listing organizational culture and reporting structures and how success is measured - but stops short of salary. Why? You were doing to so well!)
It annoys the hell out of specifically me. And I want to like you!
I’m not asking that salary negotiations be eliminated, I’m just asking for honesty. List a range. If it’s genuinely a huge range, list a huge range. I, for one, would be intrigued by such a listing - clearly that is an organization with an open mind about what kind of person would fit in such a role. How dreamy! Don’t make me pull up your 990 and see how much your last Executive Director made and then try to extrapolate from there (YES WE ALL DO IT). In a sector that prides itself in breaking barriers and reducing inequality we are woefully out of step here.
Also, Idealist, you’re the largest aggregator of US nonprofit jobs online***, start making it a requirement.
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*When I say “we” I mean everyone looking for jobs and also asked to share listings within our nonprofit circles.
**When I say “you” imagine I’m pointing an angry finger at the nonprofit industrial complex and also every organization behind a listing with this phrase.
***I don’t know that for a fact, but I assume it to be true based on my over-reliance on it over the last decade. If you’re not the biggest you’re one of the biggest. You get it.