Dear Liz,

I’ve been an HR recruiter since 2002. I was taught to ask a job-seeker for his or her current salary. I heard you speak at a recruiting event and you said that we shouldn’t ask job applicants for their salary information.

Why do you give that advice?

Thanks,

Brenda

Dear Brenda,

Like you, I was taught always to ask for an applicant’s salary history. The idea was that once we know what someone has been earning, we can gauge his value to another employer and thus to our own company.

There are three problems with this approach.

For starters, what someone earned at a different job may have zip-all to do with his value to your shop. A good recruiter should be able to interview a candidate and determine his pay level without needing payroll data from a completely different firm in different circumstances — right?

Isn’t it a fundamental recruiting proficiency to gauge the suitability of people for roles, and their value to an employer in dollars and cents? So, it’s pretty sad — some would say pathetic — that we HR people keep asking candidates for their salary histories, as though we have no other way to peg their market value.

The second problem with asking candidates for salary data is that it’s rude.

We wouldn’t ask an acquaintance, “What did you pay for your house?” We don’t ask people for personal financial information because responsible grown-ups taught us our manners when we were little.

The requirement to treat people respectfully doesn’t disappear in a job-interview situation. It’s still rude to intrude on someone’s financial affairs. As recruiters, we set the tone for the employer-candidate interaction by the way we value a job-seeker’s time, attention and privacy.

If you’re a third-party recruiter, it’s a different story; your candidates want to tell you what they’ve been earning, so you can slot them into the right positions among your clients. If you work for an employer, and if you’ll be part of the negotiation process, working on the employer’s side of it, it’s rude to ask for (or demand) a job-seeker’s salary details.

The third reason I advise people to keep their noses out of job-seekers’ salary histories is that it’s unfair to ask an applicant for information you wouldn’t fork over yourself.

If you told a job-seeker, “Can you tell me what you were being paid at XYZ Company? If you do that, I’ll tell you what we paid the last three people in the job you’re interviewing for” that would be one thing. If an employer isn’t happy to open the kimono just as much as it’s asking the job-seeker to do, then the employer is being heavy-handed.

You can’t expect to pull in the best talent treating job-seekers like they’re lower on the totem pole than your company is. Employers who take the view, “There are so many job-seekers, we can ask them whatever we want to” miss the point; you’ll never build a great company hiring the most docile and sheep-like people you can find.