A job description without a salary range is a waste of everyone’s time.

A job description without a salary range is a waste of everyone's time.

What's the goal?

Attract people who want $200K when your budget is $80K?

Spend four interviews pretending the gap doesn't exist?

Then try to sell them on "upside" from company stock that nobody can value, touch, or explain clearly?

A salary range is just a filter. It removes interviews with people who were never going to say yes. That's the whole trick, and it's free.

What goes in the range

Put the base. Put the on-target earnings. Say how the commission works in one sentence. "$55,000 base, $150 per meeting held, 5% of closed revenue, realistic first year $80,000 to $95,000." That's it. A good rep reads that and knows in ten seconds whether to apply.

If you don't know the numbers yet, that's a different problem, and it's a bigger one than the job post. You're about to hire someone into a comp plan you haven't designed.

"But I don't want competitors to see what I pay"

Your competitors already know what a sales rep costs. Your candidates are the ones in the dark, and they're the ones you need to say yes.

The reps you actually want, the ones with options, skip the posts with no number. They assume the number is bad. Usually they're right.

The rest of the post

Once the range is in, the rest of the job description gets shorter, not longer. Who you sell to. What a normal day looks like, in dials and meetings, not in adjectives. Where the job is. Who they report to and how often that person will actually talk to them.

Skip the paragraph about being a "fast-paced, dynamic environment." Every company says it. Nobody has ever applied because of it.

I promise you, you'll never lose by being transparent.

Just put the salary range in the job description. You won't lose anything. You'll just finally stop wasting time interviewing the wrong people.