I'm occasionally involved in recruitment at the company I work at. It's not actually a part of my job description, but since our HR team is so small and we have large recruitment targets a lot of senior managers such as myself get drafted.
We're not trained beyond the details of what we're 'allowed' to discuss with applicants at which times. As you might guess, salary is one of the last things that is discussed, and there are SO many hoops applicants are asked to jump through.
I jumped through the same hoops to get my job, and while frustrated I felt grateful at the end to get the job. We really are brainwashed in this way, and I see it in a lot of applicants that get messed around so much but keep their faith and trust in a system that really looks at them in a toxic way.
So I started doing things differently.
When I received applications that did not meet our recruitment needs, I sent a personal email back explaining what we were looking for and why they were unsuccessful, and thanking them for applying and wishing them luck. When relevant I even advised them of other roles we had open that might be more appropriate. Previously, we were told to ignore applications who would get a mass automated rejection email when we'd filled the role (or else would just be ignored), often not hearing back for weeks or months.
Part of the application form people fill in includes current salary. Unfortunately I can't change the form, but what I started doing is including the salary range we have for the role in the invitation to our first interview, if they passed the application screen.
The result? Yesterday I had 4 out of 9 applicants withdraw because the salary range was not what they wanted. That's 4 people I would not have to spend hours meeting and going back and forth on. There's also a whole competency test stage that we usually force applicants to suffer through, only to have wasted everyone's time because the salary is not what they want.
Instead I found that the candidates that know the range from the get-go are more engaged in the process and so much more relaxed and less wary in the interviews. The ones that withdrew were very polite and even thanked me – there were no hard feelings. Everyone is treated with respect and as adults when there is more transparency.
There's a lot that needs to change in the way people are treated at work, and this sub is doing some amazing things for changing hearts and minds. We need to free ourselves from system indoctrination, step by step.