What happened when our clients started publishing salary ranges
Application volume fell. Shortlist quality rose. Here is what changed across 180 roles advertised with and without a published range.
Daniel Okafor
Principal Consultant, Data & AI · 11 June 2026 · 5 min read
Pay transparency regulation has arrived unevenly across our markets, so we had a natural experiment: 180 comparable roles, some advertised with a published range and some without, across the same period and the same sectors.
Roles with a published range received 28% fewer applications on average. Every client who saw that number first was alarmed by it. They should not have been: the shortlist-to-application ratio more than doubled, and the total number of candidates reaching final stage was slightly higher.
The applications that disappeared were overwhelmingly from candidates whose expectations were outside the range — people who would have withdrawn at the offer conversation anyway, after consuming several hours of interviewer time.
Time-to-offer fell by an average of nine days, almost entirely because the salary conversation happened at the start instead of the end. Offer acceptance rose from 79% to 90%.
The one caveat worth stating: a range published dishonestly is worse than no range. Ranges spanning more than about 35% of the midpoint were treated by candidates as meaningless, and performed no better than roles with nothing published at all.