Ever felt frustrated with a job ad because it didn’t include the salary? Us too. At Adzuna HQ, we’ve looked into the top annoyances for jobseekers and unsurprisingly, a lack of pay clarity features high on the list. Precisely, close to half (48%) of our respondents said that no salary or a lack of salary clarity in job postings is their biggest bugbear.
We know how annoying this is, and that’s why we started a campaign to #MakeSalariesMandatory. We’re on a mission to make the job market fairer and more transparent by calling on all businesses to show salaries in their job ads and campaigning for the UK government to make including salaries in all job ads a legal requirement.
Want to transform the job landscape for the better? Sign our petition now.
Top 10 biggest pain points when applying for a job
UK jobseekers cited many challenges when applying for a new role and said the worst pain point is not hearing back from the company after application. Alarmingly, jobseekers have applied on average for seven jobs in the last five years with just three in ten (30%) of those applications leading to an interview. So deep is the issue that four in ten (42%) Brits have wanted to move jobs but decided against it as the process of job hunting is too stressful. On average, this led them to staying in the job for an additional 3.5 years. A tenth (13%) are still in their job as a result.
Here’s our overview of the top 10 biggest pain points when applying for a job:
- Not hearing back/not receiving a reply after applying (32%)
- No salary being listed on the job ad (28%)
- Waiting too long to hear back after an interview (26%)
- Lack of feedback following rejection for a role (26%)
- Too many stages to the interview process (24%)
- Turned down because ‘not enough experience’ despite already looking at the CV (23%)
- Interview process dragging out over multiple weeks or even months (22%)
- Needing to update your CV for every application (22%)
- Misleading job ads (22%)
- Lack of clarity on salary, e.g. ‘on target earnings’ or very large salary ranges
(20%)
To dig into this further, we asked always-honest Olivia Attwood to ask people in Shoreditch about their job hunting frustrations.
Join Olivia and sign the petition!
How jobseekers respond to a lack of salary transparency
Do you know how many hours jobseekers wasted searching for a job?
The answer is six hours per position, and trust me, they’re already the lucky ones. 13% of jobseekers who applied for a job with the wrong salary had wasted 10 hours, and 3% invested over 20 hours interviewing for the wrong job.
Now, can you guess the hours UK jobseekers wasted because of wrong salary during job search in the last five years?
Our analysis on job hunting activity found out that UK workers have wasted over 70 million hours applying for jobs with the wrong salary. You saw it right, it’s 70 million hours — that equates to about 3 million days or 96,000 months or 7,985 years.
Therefore, it’s unsurprising to learn that more than a third (36%) declined a job straight-out after they found out the intended salary, after going through lengthy interview processes. Furthermore, almost half of workers (46%) wouldn’t attend an interview in future if they didn’t know what an employer was willing to offer in terms of salary.
Want to stop this vicious cycle? Sign the petition now.
Brits want salary transparency
Seven in ten Brits (69%) think employers need to be more transparent on their job ads, with a third (31%) believing salary transparency should be the number one priority on postings – more important than the job role itself (18%), the location (11%) or any work benefit schemes (7%).
UK workers are crying out for more transparency in the jobs market. In fact, the lack of salary on a job ad makes potential employees sceptical of an employer. A third (32%) assume the company is hiding something, while a quarter believe it shows the company would underpay them (24%). Others think it makes the company look untrustworthy (22%), unprofessional (21%) or shows them to be biased on how they pay their employees (18%).
A third of Brits (32%) don’t know how much their colleagues are getting paid but four in five (80%) would be open or are neutral to their colleagues knowing how much they earn. Two thirds (63%) think employers making salaries more transparent would make the workplace fairer.
Sign the petition, share it with friends, get salary transparency sorted now!
The real issue
The lack of salary transparency is frustrating on a practical level. The bigger underlying issue is that it helps perpetuate the gender pay gap and bias. The research revealed that women (33%) are much more likely to find lack of salary transparency an issue when compared to men (21%). There is also a connection between salary transparency and the gender pay gap.
A recent analysis by The Times called out companies with the biggest gender pay gaps, including ASOS, EasyJet and Savills, all of which have low levels of salary transparency according to our data.
By regions, Yorkshire and The Humber (63%) is the most open and honest whilst London (55%), Scotland (49%) and Northern Ireland (28%) are at the bottom of the roster. Interestingly, London has been cited in the news as having both the worst ethnicity pay gap and worst gender pay gap which adds fuel to the fire.
The lack of salary transparency is also an industry-wide problem. Charity and voluntary jobs (88%) are the most transparent, followed by social work (76%) and manufacturing (75%). Creative and design jobs (32%) are the least transparent, while retail jobs (37%), energy jobs (39%) and IT jobs at (43%) also rank amongst the lowest.
Had enough of the widening gender pay gap? Sign the petition for a change.
