We’ve been contacting company internal recruitment teams asking for product owner salary ranges when none is provided with a Product Owner job posting. We’ve emailed, tweeted, and filled out web forms in the hope of getting an answer.
Out of 81 product owner jobs (UK based) this week, 48 had unknown salary ranges. We only had a success rate of 1 in 8 companies replying with salary range details.
Surprisingly, a number of replies confirmed that jobseekers have to apply in order to then learn about salary details during the hiring process. Here’s how one of our exchanges went:
inkscroll: Could you please let me know what is the salary range for your posted Product Owner vacancy, ref: NNN?
Internal Recruiter: No, unfortunately I cannot tell you the range, this is private and confidential – if you are interested in the position, please apply and someone will be in contact to discuss salary expectations etc.
inkscroll: Thank you for getting back to me. It seems as if this role is quite experienced and senior given the phrase ‘extensive leadership’ in the job description but difficult to gauge given the rest of the info provided and it’s not easy to know if one should invest in the time applying or not.
Tumbleweed….
To be fair, they did reply within 3 hours of receiving our question.
Applying would mean signing up first with them, via workday, in order to start filling out an application form which will take a while as a first timer. Something that we’re sure others have already experienced! And who knows, perhaps the recruiting team wouldn’t deem the applicant suitable to speak to so you would never discover what the range was. That is, until you sleuthed and found the person who accepted their future job offer and asked them what salary they signed on with!
Maybe that’s a contributing factor to why their job is still accepting new applications after 3 months of being originally posted…?
This is just one reason why we added the feature which allows people to comment on specific open vacancies. Maybe you took the time to apply, had a conversation, and discovered that the mysterious product owner salary range was too low for you so you eliminated that job from your list. Wouldn’t you want to save someone else from having to go through that experience?
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