required salary field for jobs

[gwiedeman]

Jobs posted on the Code4Lib Job Board should require at least some sort of salary statement.

Salary transparency is important to ensure people are appropriately compensated for their work. Seven US states already require salary transparency, and a number of professional organizations require salary information for jobs to be posted, including the Society of American Archivists (SAA), the Association of College and Research Libraries/Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS), and the Digital Library Federation (DLF). I'm unsure if these job boards have received less postings since these policy changes, but as a user, I have not noticed them becoming any less useful. The SAA Archival Compensation Task Force has more information regarding the SAA policy change.

Just requiring the string field may not be an ideal solution, as employers could easily enter text that provides no meaningful salary details. Yet, I feel that just having that little asterisk will go a long way toward encouraging employers to state a salary range. As these posts are moderated, I suspect it would also be feasible to have a stated salary policy, however I'm not sure who the authorizing body for this would be and we would be hesitant to require more of volunteer moderators. Just requiring the field may have much of the desired affect without having another governance process.

Overall, I feel like this is a super easy change that will provide much more salary information to job seekers with little downside risk.

[ross-spencer]

Echoing Greg's call for salary information to be mandatory. At a minimum it provides a safety net for those entering salary negotiations, more than that, it improves the chances of salaries increasing across the field, which is so very badly needed.

[jrochkind]

As a potential job seeker, I really want to still see postings even if the institution posting has archaic rules such that salary can not be included.

I think the utility of the jobs board would for potential job-seekers would be decreased if jobs without salary ranges did not appear on it.

So I would oppose prohibiting jobs from being posted without salary range. If it is still possible to do but the UI is just meant to discourage it, the UI should make sure that it's clear that you can still post without a salary range.

I wonder if it would be more useful to instead have a filter for viewers to let them filter out jobs without salary ranges, if desired? If the UI change makes it harder for the software to tell which postings have salary ranges and which don't (say if it ends up encouraging people to enter non-salary-range info in the salary range box), this might make it less feasible to have a filter for jobs only with salary ranges, which would be another problem.

This PR to me seems an undesirable middle-ground where a poster can list something like "not available" in the salary field if they realize they can (thus making it impossible to filter jobs with salaries listed vs not), while those who don't realize they can won't post (making those jobs invisible to jobs seekers who might want them), in an inconsistent tangle.

Can we come up with a solution with better UX? Which would depend on whether the goal is prohibiting postings without salary ranges (which I would oppose, but then let's require numeric field with start and stop), or just discouraging them (then how about a filter for users to view jobs with/without ranges, plus a warning to posters, maybe even a confirmation "Are you sure you want to post without a salary range? Fewer viewers will see your posting. Y/N".