It means they are not telling you the number. Here is how to get it.
By Frankie Bexley ·
Competitive salary is not a statement about the salary. It is the absence of a statement, in the place where the statement should be, and it is doing that on purpose.
The number exists. It is in the internal requisition, it has a band with a top and a bottom, and somebody decided not to print it.
Why it is there at all
A job advert has two jobs that pull against each other. It has to attract you, and it has to commit to nothing. Almost the entire vocabulary of recruitment lives in the gap between those two, and this phrase is the purest example of it.
That is not always a con. An employer with a wide band across several levels of seniority genuinely cannot print one number without misleading somebody. An employer who does not want you to know what the person next to you earns is doing something else. The advert reads identically either way, which is the problem.
What to say
- Ask for the band before the first interview, not after the second. The cost of asking is lowest before anybody has invested time in you, and that is exactly when people feel least entitled to ask.
- If the answer is that it depends on experience, ask what the top of the band is. That is a real number and they have it. Depends on experience is the same move a second time.
- Ask in writing. A number said in a room is not a number you can hold anybody to.
The related ones, doing the same job
Salary negotiable is the same sentence with the direction reversed: it tells you the band is soft without telling you which way. Depending on experience puts the burden on you to justify a number you have not been given. Up to, in front of a figure, is the top of the band and not the middle of it.
None of these is a lie. Every one of them is accurate. That is what makes the vocabulary work and it is why reading it as a con is as useless as taking it at face value.
Questions people ask about this
Does competitive salary mean the salary is good?
No. It is not a claim about the level of the salary at all. It is a decision not to publish a number that exists. A well-paid role and a badly paid one produce the same phrase.
Is it rude to ask for the salary range before an interview?
No, and it is cheapest then. Asking before anybody has spent time on you costs nothing; asking after two interviews feels like a demand. Employers who post a band expect the question, and employers who do not have usually been asked it before.
Why do employers not just publish the salary?
Sometimes because the band genuinely spans several levels of seniority and one number would mislead. Sometimes to keep existing staff from comparing. The advert reads the same either way, which is why the only reliable move is to ask rather than to guess which one you are looking at.
This is one chapter of What Job Adverts Actually Mean. The rest of it is the same, at greater length, with the sources in the back.