Open ten job ads in your industry right now and count how many actually tell you what the role pays.
Not many. Maybe one or two, if you're lucky.
Competitive salary.
Salary negotiable.
Depending on experience.
Three different ways of saying the same thing: we're not telling you, and you'll have to get through half the process before you find out.
Candidates have started reading that as a red flag, and they're right to. In a job market where information about almost everything else is available in seconds, a job ad that goes quiet on the one detail that determines whether the role is even worth pursuing stands out for the wrong reasons.
This isn't a small formatting choice. It's one of the most consequential decisions in the entire ad, and it's the one most business owners get wrong without realising it's costing them anything at all.
Why business owners leave it out
Nobody sits down and decides to be cagey on purpose. There's usually a reason, and most of them feel completely sensible at the time, which is exactly why the habit is so hard to shake.
🔹Worry that stating a number rules out someone great who might have accepted less
🔹Worry that stating a number rules out someone great who was hoping for more
🔹Not being totally sure what the market rate actually is right now
🔹Wanting room to negotiate once you've met someone and liked them
🔹Concern that existing staff will see the ad and start comparing it to their own pay
Every one of those is a real concern. None of them actually gets solved by leaving the number out.
Take the first two. The worry that a number rules someone out cuts both ways, and business owners often only think about one direction. Yes, a candidate hoping for more might not apply. But a candidate who would have been happy with the figure you'd offer might also not apply, because they've assumed, reasonably, that "competitive" means something they can't afford to find out about. You don't avoid ruling people out by hiding the number. You just lose visibility over who's ruling themselves out, and why.
The negotiation worry is similar. Ruling someone out doesn't stop happening because you hid the figure. It just moves to later in the process, after you've both spent hours on it, instead of happening in the first five seconds when a candidate reads the ad. A negotiation that happens honestly, from a published range, tends to be shorter and less fraught than one that only starts once someone's already emotionally invested in a role they don't yet know they can afford to take.
And the concern about existing staff deserves its own honest look, because it's often the real reason underneath all the others, even when it isn't said out loud.
The existing staff worry deserves a straight answer
This one's worth sitting with a little longer, because it's rarely really about the job ad at all. If publishing a genuine number for a new role would cause real friction with people already on the team, the ad isn't the problem. The gap between what's being offered to attract someone new and what's currently being paid to keep someone experienced is the actual issue, and it exists whether or not the number ever makes it onto a public ad.
Hiding the figure doesn't close that gap. It just delays the moment someone notices it, usually at the worst possible time, when a new starter mentions their pay in passing and an existing team member does the maths. That conversation tends to land far worse when it happens by accident than it would if pay across the team had already been looked at honestly before a new ad went live.
🔹A quick internal check on where existing pay sits relative to what you're planning to advertise, before the ad goes live
🔹A genuine explanation ready if a gap does exist, tied to experience, tenure, or scope, rather than silence if it comes up
🔹Treating a pay gap as something to actually address, not just something to keep hidden for as long as possible
None of this means every hire needs to trigger a full pay review. It means going into the ad with eyes open about what publishing an honest number might surface, rather than being caught off guard by a conversation that was always going to happen eventually.
What it actually costs you
A job ad with no salary doesn't attract a wider pool. It attracts a differently shaped one, and not usually in your favour.
Strong candidates who are weighing up several options tend to filter out the ads that don't tell them anything. It's rarely pure salary obsession driving that. A role with no salary is a role they'd have to invest real time in just to find out whether it's even worth considering, and people with options are careful about where they spend that time.
That leaves you with two groups more likely to apply anyway: people who are desperate enough to apply to almost anything regardless of pay, and people who simply didn't read closely enough to notice the gap. Neither is the shortlist you actually want, and neither reflects the quality of candidate your business could genuinely attract if the ad gave them a real reason to engage with it.
🔹Candidates comparing several ads will rank the ones with numbers higher, even when your role is the better fit on every other measure
🔹A missing figure often gets read as the business not having settled on the role's worth yet, which raises its own questions
🔹The applicants who do come through skew toward volume over quality, because the filtering that should happen at the ad stage never gets the chance to
There's a second cost that shows up later in the process, and it's the more expensive one. You run several interviews, everyone's invested time, and then the number finally comes up somewhere around interview two or three. If it's lower than the candidate expected, you've lost them, and lost every hour spent getting to that point along with it. If it's higher than they expected, you've probably just paid more than you needed to, because nobody negotiated from a shared, honest starting point.
Either way, the ad without a number didn't protect you from anything. It just delayed the exact conversation you were trying to avoid, to the point where having it costs considerably more than it would have on day one.
What candidates actually think when the number's missing
Put yourself on the other side of the ad for a second, because this is where the disconnect really shows up.
You've read the role, you like the sound of it, and then you get to the pay line and it says "competitive." What do you actually assume?
Most candidates don't assume the best case. They assume the number's being hidden because it's lower than they'd want, or because the business hasn't actually worked out what the role is worth yet, which reads as its own kind of warning sign about how organised the rest of the process is likely to be.
🔹"Competitive" without a figure usually reads as below market, not above it
🔹A missing number reads as disorganisation just as often as it reads as room to negotiate
🔹A candidate comparing several ads will simply spend less time reading the rest of yours, because the one detail they were scanning for isn't there
None of this is candidates being difficult or overly demanding. It's candidates doing exactly what any of us would do with limited time and several genuine options: filtering hard for the information that's actually available, and treating anything left blank as a small but real reason for caution.
The fix doesn't require a single, fixed number
This is where most of the hesitation comes from, and it's worth clearing up directly, because it's usually the sticking point that keeps business owners stuck on "competitive" long after they've read every article telling them not to be.
Putting a salary in the ad doesn't mean committing to one figure with zero flexibility at all. A genuine range does the job. Something that reflects where you'd realistically land depending on experience, and gives a real candidate enough information to decide whether it's worth their time applying in the first place.
🔹A range with a sensible spread, not a token gap of a thousand dollars that isn't really a range at all
🔹A short note that the top of the range reflects experience, if that's genuinely how it would play out
🔹Enough honesty in the number that it wouldn't embarrass you if a current staff member happened to read it
That last point is worth sitting with rather than avoiding. If the honest figure would be uncomfortable for existing staff to see, that's rarely a job ad problem. It's usually a sign that pay across the team needs its own honest look, and hiding the number on a new ad only delays a conversation that was always going to need having eventually.
If you genuinely don't know what the market rate is, that's worth fixing before the ad goes live, rather than a reason to leave the line blank indefinitely. A quick look at a handful of comparable ads, a conversation with people in your industry, or a chat with whoever handles your hiring support gets you a defensible range faster than most business owners expect, and far faster than the weeks it takes to find out the hard way that your original number was off.
What changes once the range is actually published
The benefit of putting a number in the ad doesn't stop at who applies. It changes the entire shape of the process that follows, usually for the better.
Interviews stop carrying an undisclosed agenda item that both sides are aware of but neither wants to raise first. Once pay's already on the table, the conversation in the room can actually focus on the role and the person, rather than everyone circling around the number they both know is coming eventually.
🔹Candidates who make it to interview have already self selected as genuinely interested at that pay level
🔹There's no awkward moment late in the process where the number finally surfaces and resets everyone's expectations
🔹Negotiation, when it happens at all, tends to be smaller and more straightforward, because it's starting from an honest baseline both sides agreed to upfront
This also changes how candidates behave once an offer's on the table. A candidate who applied knowing the range, and stayed engaged through the whole process anyway, is a candidate who's already mentally committed to the number. That makes the final "yes" considerably more likely, and considerably faster, than one where pay only gets discussed for the first time once an offer's about to be made.
What to do if you genuinely don't know the market rate yet
Plenty of business owners avoid publishing a number for an honest reason: they genuinely aren't sure yet what the role should pay, rather than any real intent to hide something. That's a completely fair position to be in, and it's fixable well before the ad needs to go live.
A handful of comparable ads in your industry, even ones you're not directly competing with for candidates, will usually give you a rough band to work from. A short conversation with an industry contact who's hired for something similar recently often gets you closer still. And if you're working with a Hiring Partner, this is exactly the kind of question worth asking early, because getting the range roughly right the first time saves the far more expensive problem of readvertising a role that was priced wrong from the outset.
🔹Look at three to five genuinely comparable ads, not just the first ones that come up in a search
🔹Ask someone in your network who's hired a similar role recently what they landed on
🔹Treat the first range as a reasonable starting estimate, not a number set in stone forever
None of this needs to take long, and it's time spent once, at the very start of the process, rather than time spent repeatedly explaining a vague figure to every candidate who asks.
The bigger picture
Putting the number in the ad isn't really about the number itself. It's about respecting the time of the person reading it, and being upfront about the one detail that determines whether the rest of the ad is even worth their attention.
The businesses that do this well aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones willing to be straightforward about what they can offer, and willing to trust that the right candidate for the role will see that straightforwardness as a reason to apply, rather than a reason to keep scrolling.
Everything else in your ad, the culture, the growth, the flexibility, the day to day, only gets properly read once someone's decided the pay sits in the right neighbourhood. Hide that line, and you're effectively asking every candidate to read the rest of the ad on faith, before they know whether the basics line up. Most of them, understandably, won't bother.
Would you apply to your own job ad, knowing only what's written on the page?
Ash + Emerald HQ Team 💎
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