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If you’re looking to hire and you aren’t prepared to offer candidates at least $80,000 per year, perhaps don’t bother posting the job.
The lowest salary applicants are willing to accept for a new job is a record $78,645 per year, according to new data from a July SEC labor market survey. That’s more than the $72,873 they expected last July. The data could be the spur HR leaders need to make offering higher wages a larger part of their recruiting and retention efforts.
“Many workers feel that even though they’ve received these big nominal wage increases since the pandemic, they’ve become no better off because their wages have just tracked inflation and not risen for productivity at all, and they’re expecting wages to catch up to inflation and productivity and to be made whole,” Julia Pollak, chief economist for ZipRecruiter, told CNN on Monday.
Despite greater attention being paid to the wage gap, women still expect to make less than men: Their salary expectation was $66,068, more than $12,000 less than the average and $25,000 below men’s expectation of $91,048.
“The fact that women are earning 84% of what men earn but expect only 73% suggests that perhaps the media narrative [of the gender pay gap] makes women expect even less and that perhaps we are not preparing young women for the workforce adequately,” Pollak said.
The survey—which is based on the responses from around 1,000 people—also found that the percentage of workers who expect to receive a job offer in the next four months declined to 18.7% from 21.1% in July 2022, below pre-pandemic levels. Employees, especially those under age 45, also have a greater expectation than they did a year ago that they’ll become unemployed in the next four months, and a slightly lower expectation that they’ll get a new job offer.
HR departments also need to ramp up their retention efforts to retain older workers: The SEC found that “the average expected likelihood of working beyond age 62 declined to 47.7% from 48.8% in July 2022.” This is “the lowest reading since the start of the series in March 2014.”