It occurs to me that the main reason interviewers want to put the salary at the END of the process is because they want to manipulate you as much as possible to lowball you as little as possible. I never realized what the actual tactic was and originally just thought it was delusional business leaders being full of themselves, but it's actually a working psychological trick on the unwary to get you to accept less. It's exactly the same as the tactic used in sales to “build value” that I was taught years ago. How insidious.
I'm posting this because I have recently been looking for new work and found a bunch of posts from business interviewers on work sites I have visited who went on about how asking about salary “too early” in the interview process was a “red flag”, because you were not spending any time on the “getting to know each other phase”, and the interviewers in question stated that they would usually pass on the candidate because of it.
Underneath the veneer of indignation I noticed that this practice looked a lot like something I was taught while I was in sales during a really rough part of my life. “Building value” is basically something you have to do to show the customer how much good the product you are selling will do them, and it allows you to bypass their tendency to not want to buy things they do not currently need by transforming the product from a “purchase” into an “investment”, which for useful products that DO deliver, can be sold much easier (even though technically EVERY item we buy is some form of investment anyways).
So basically this practice of keeping the salary at the END of an interviewer will, if you don't pay attention, make the job offer seem much more reasonable because it chips away at your barriers. They let you think you are getting more than you really are because psychologically your current acquisition (the job) is being lumped in with all that extra value, making the deal that much more attractive.
Consider all the “benefits” they might go on about, how “great it is to work here” and such, and it all makes sense from all the interviews that I remember and have read about. If this is what they are doing, then understand that this is will have an effect on your decision, especially in the heat of the moment.
I just hope that we have a discussion about this and normalize being aware of this practice to prevent anyone, especially young or new workers, and *especially* vulnerable or desperate workers from taking jobs that won't work for them because the baseline of their relationship with the business they will work with or for doesn't meet their needs. I was myself talked out of changing jobs because I was sold on the idea of earning a pay raise at my then current job, only to be told later after a year of going broke that they were never going to pay me no matter how much I earned it because I “was making too much money”. I was not even covering my costs of living. I was losing money. They knew that. I quit on the spot. For some reason they were very mad.
Anyways, I wouldn't want anyone to do what I did and dig themselves into a hole by not realizing that this “Salary at the end of the interview” process is a red flag, and even if you go through with it, keep in mind that this IS a tactic so they can't oversell you on the added “benefits” so you can honestly decide if the offered position actually fulfills what you need.