What’s infuriating here? You almost never get a reason why you have been declined (if they even answer you). So I find this message pretty nice and polite… Or am I overlooking something?
100% this. This is pretty classy. We are typically told to not even contact external candidates. HR will send them the impersonal notice.
I think the requested salary amount plays a big role. If a typical 100k annual role was rejected on salary misalignments despite requesting 60k, I would be much more critical of the company.
I was asking for £30,000 a year. I don’t think that’s unreasonable for a professional position.
Holy shit that’s low. I was asking for £35k in 2004 for a technical role. They wanted to pay 17.
That’s a very reasonable salary request
I know you recently moved. Have you considered the pay is lower because the benefits are higher? In the UK they have universal healthcare which means that part of your salary which used to go to healthcare is now not needed. Perhaps that’s why they gave you a lower offer than you’re used to in american wages?
If the pay is lower than £30,000 a year, I can’t get a family visa for my wife and daughter.
Meanwhile, a recruited told me I should be asking for £50,000 a year.
And if you look at how much rents are even in the outskirts of London, I think you will find that low amount of pay is not going to let you have much of a life.
My gut tells me you should ask for $35k.
In my experience, lots of employers (American that is) have offered me a thousand or two less than my request during offers.
I probably shouldn’t be doing as lowball an offer as possible, but I’m getting pretty anxious about getting a job because time is trickling away, as is money.
I hear that. Are there recruiters in your field you can utilize?
I’m facing eviction because my job (uber driver) isn’t paying enough, seemingly no matter how many hours I work. Got a call from the landlord who said they were gonna go ahead and set up a court date for the eviction.
Have you considered the pay is lower because the benefits are higher? In the UK they have universal healthcare which means that part of your salary which used to go to healthcare is now not needed.
Bro I’m not even from the UK I’m from Spain where wages are lower in technical fields and all your “benefits” are the bare minimum any job offers. You then need to offer stuff like remote work, flexible pay, flexible hours, restaurant ticket and more for me to consider a lower wage.
I’m on a technical field and 30k€ would be the bare minimum I would ask for a job after having like 2 years of experience.
Not even trying to negotiate from 30k means they are asking lower than 25k and that’s laughable low for a tech job.
And I’m in Spain, one of the cheapest European countries regarding tech work pay.
Agree, 30k €/£/chf is very low.
I’ve never worked nor lived in London but it is a capital, it should be at least 50k.
In Switzerland we would have something around 75 to 120k chf according to specific details (industry, experience, location etc).
30k a year is like working at Tesco pay, mate
“Junior Video Editor” sounds like it should command a higher price tag than cashiering.
The unfortunate truth is while it’s skilled, it’s also a high demand industry which people want to work in. That means there’s an endless supply of bright eyed youngsters willing to do it for pennies while living at their parents (low expenses), and thus plenty of companies willing to abuse them. Another comment points out they’ll be looking for another in 3 months times and that’s probably accurate. At some point these companies realise “damn, maybe having to train up a newbie 3 times a year and having consistently shitty output because of it isn’t that great after all, maybe we should hire someone worth their salt even if they cost us more” and that’s where proper positions become available, but you have to find them.
I feel like the numbers matter here. I recently moved jobs and the posted salary was the full range for the role. The hiring range is a narrower slice of that range. The range below the hiring target is internal development space. The space above is …well they don’t want to use it. They want a couple years of salary increase to keep you from immediately starting your next job search I think. lol.
They didn’t give a salary range. That was part of the problem. They just asked me what my salary would be. I said £30,000 a year. For a job in fucking London that requires technical experience. Meaning I would have a good 90 minute commute from anywhere I could hope to live.
And that still wasn’t low enough.
That’s actually insane.
I wonder if they’ve just sent out a generic rejection without checking it.
That is a possibility I hadn’t considered.
They probably want single people that live ten to a flat and can afford to work for 30,000 a year.
That’s who they’ll get.
I recently moved jobs and the posted salary was the full range for the role.
The salary range should always be changing with inflation and cost of living. That most likely means that being hired at the lower band of the range means you are going to stay at that part of the hiring range. If not, it means hitting the top end after a few years is a ceiling and you were probably being underpaid the whole time.
I was a civil servant. The hiring bands were pretty wide well defined there, at least for technical specialists like yours truly. The 50-60% of max range is considered developmental and would normally be given to an internal candidate who was being groomed as part of a succession plan. 60-80% is the sweet spot, and they will go to 90% for an exceptional candidate. Only once in my career did I negotiate 100% of max - and it was because I was taking a pay cut in the new role. I was changing jurisdictions because I was ( and still am) in love.
It’s now law in my region that job descs must include a salary range (and not $1-$1m DoE).
Before then, my friend with three degrees and a faang-laden resume had a phrase he used:
“To be sure this project is adequately budgeted, let me know what salary range you’re considering offering. This is a big ‘mineshaft canary’ for me, as an under-buggeted project is doomed to failure and also lets me know how your Project Management, Finance, Devel, and IT groups interact. If it’s not healthy, the budget will reflect that.”
Or so. But he approached things differently, given his credentials.
Bollocks!
If they want to hire cheap, they’ll end up getting cheap work.
We live in a capitalist trap, and they suck for not paying a fair wage in it.
100% agreed.
We live in the early stages of the Singularity. By the end of this process, there will be no jobs for humans any longer.
Salary demands are a good way to weed out the cheapskate companies that can’t retain employees, won’t treat you with respect, and generally aren’t worth the effort. Frustrating, yes, but it’s their loss and not yours.
From the title “Junior Video Editor” and your description of the salary you proposed it sounds like this is an entry-level job that’ll probably go to someone fresh out of school.
It’s hard to read too much into it because this might just be a form letter, but it sounds like they genuinely thought you were a good candidate but they were looking for a more junior position. Sometimes this is dictated by their budget available.
Even if this is a form letter, they probably have a letter for the case where the salary was OK but they never want to hear from the candidate again. So you didn’t get that letter, at least!
It looks like this was a “near miss”. It’s discouraging, but keep at it, you can do it.
I dunno. I see a lot of junior and entry level with a whole lot of experience expectations.
You would think “junior” meant entry-level, because I did at first, but I have seen a lot of jobs with that word in their title paying over £40,000 a year, so I think it might mean “junior executive” or something.
And thank you!
Think of American high school, where a “junior” is in their third of four years.
That makes sense, although hard for me to process.
I wouldn’t count on it. Been getting those letters for a good 10 years.
That industry is rife with exploitation; I’ve collected pages and pages of resume builders, entry level, junior, blah blah blah. Budgets are low because work and experience isn’t valued. If you do make it work, congratulations, you’re the rare example.
I switched careers from video/film because I didn’t want to live out of a car and other jobs paid better.
Hold up aren’t you the person who ditched the U.S. for Britain like a month ago?
Hope you get a job soon, keep on searching! Miracles happen when you least expect them :)
That would be me. Thank you.
Good for you keeping standards high or else it becomes a race to the bottom. Whats great is when you see something like this and then the same company is looking for the same thing three months later.
This is why, when asked for salary requirements, the answer is always “Negotiable”.
Unfortunately the form required only a number. They apparently just wanted me to guess. And I seriously lowballed. £30,000 a year for any professional job in London is crazy low.
I feel like part of the insult is also not just with this particular company, but with the industry in general. I worked on the sound side as both production and post, and the amounts that places are willing to pay these engineer roles always seems to be insulting.
But either you take it or leave it, because there’s someone else out there who is desperate enough to work for what they offer. Maybe this isn’t the same across the pond, but it’s sure been my experience here.
Surprised it doesn’t just plainly say we’re going to have AI do this job going forward.
I don’t get the skepticism. If you were deciding between two candidates of equal qualifications, and one asked for $65k, and one asked for $55k, and you chose the $55k one…what would you say to the $65k one?
Me?
I’d go for the one that fit the “vibe” the best. If everyone can do the job itself equally, you step down to the people you think are going to mesh well with everyone else (and yourself). 10k a year is a small price to pay if picking the other one is less likely to result in a smooth workplace.
After that, if those were as equal as guesswork can be, I’d look at things like proximity that might make one or other more reliable on a day-to-day basis, and if it was the higher pay request, try and negotiate. Again, that’s guesswork.
But the point is that if you look at the qualifications for a job when considering pay, it can end up costing as much or more in hassles, or be a gain that exceeds the monetary price tag in other ways.
Then again, I likely wouldn’t be in charge of hiring unless it was my own business. As an employee stuck in a hiring position, the choice would be based on policy, and a company big enough to hire and pay people to do hiring isn’t going to think the way I think.
This isn’t an attempt to counter your position, it’s just an explanation of my priorities because it’s an interesting question.
I definitely agree! There are a lot of other factors that should come into play. A corporation is more likely to focus on money. A smaller org would have more leeway to use human judgement.
I was making a general comment that a lot of junior or entry-level jobs are being replaced by AI.
