It will now be possible to choose which jobs to apply for based on pay estimates. FILE PHOTO | NMG
LinkedIn users applying for jobs on its platform will get an
estimated salary on every job notice, thanks to the social media
platform’s newly launched Salary Insights tool, driven by crowd-sourced
information from its members and employers.
The
feature is set to impact Kenya’s job market directly, with the Job
Market Report by Trends and Insights for Africa (Tifa) and jobs site
BrighterMonday showing that 65 per cent of Kenyan jobseekers now search
for jobs online. Of these, 60 per cent use online job platforms, while
23 per cent use LinkedIn.
With such significant usage,
LinkedIn’s new salary feature comes as an add-on to the LinkedIn Salary
service that has, since 2016, been giving a detailed breakdown of
salaries by job title and location based on information privately
submitted by LinkedIn members.
LinkedIn’s senior
product manager Keren Baruch introduced the new salary insight feature
to the public in a blog post on the company’s website, saying it will
now show an expected salary range on job listings, based on data from
LinkedIn’s 546+ million members and employer-provided information.
“A recent survey found that more than 70 per cent of
professionals want to hear about salary in the first message from a
recruiter. By surfacing this information early on in the process, we
hope to make the application process more seamless by allowing you to
know if a job meets your salary criteria before entering into a
conversation with the hiring manager,” said Baruch.
Transparent salaries have been found to work for employers too.
According
to a study on the relationship between wages and the number and quality
of applicants, Wages, Job Queues, and Skills, job openings with a
posted salary get 7.8 per cent more applications than job openings
without a stated salary figure.
But Tifa director
Maggie Ireri warns that such salary estimates can also work against
employers. “It can make you attract people within your budget, but you
may also miss out on qualified people who feel they do not fall within
your salary range.”
She adds: “An employer also misses out on the opportunity to explain in detail the perks that come with the job.”
In
this, upfront salary estimates may concentrate candidate
decision-making around money, rather than paying attention to job
satisfaction or career opportunities.
But the tool may also serve to prevent job losses during unrealistic salary negotiations.
When
hiring managers ask job seekers to give their salary expectations, many
guess blindly. This is especially common for graduates seeking their
first jobs, with many unaware of the normal salary range, meaning they
overshoot on their expected salary, and get rejected.
However,
crowd-sourced salary trackers such as the new LinkedIn service, and the
longstanding data provided by AfricaPay and MyWage, can be used to
avoid this gap.
The rise of crowd-sourced transparency
may also now serve to level the playing field between the genders, with
the authors of the book Why Women Don’t Ask, finding that 46 per cent of
men negotiate following a job offer, whereas only 30 per cent of women
do.
This combination of unpublicised salaries and
men’s greater tendency to negotiate for more has led to consistent
gender pay gaps.
In Kenya, a 2016 UNDP Report titled
Human Development for Everyone reported the estimated gross national
income per capita for males was $3,405 (Sh350,715) in 2015, compared to
$2,357 (Sh242,771) for females.
- African Laughter
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