Stop applying to jobs that can’t afford you.

Recently, one of my leaders (the fabulous Katie Scarpa) went deep with a candidate for a role on her team here at Oceans. Katie had reservations about their tone in an interview but after much discussion (my advice: “Tone is both coachable and easy to get wrong in singular interactions”), decided to send an offer.

The result? A quick decline based on compensation.

But here’s the catch: the salary range was listed in the job posting.

On the one hand, I get it. Companies, especially smaller ones, may not accurately understand the market and need feedback from candidates to adjust their ranges. And in a tough economy, a desperate candidate could apply to everything and then hope to convince a hiring manager to raise the salary once they’re bought in.

But, as in many cases, an emphasis on getting the most for yourself comes at a cost to others.

I’ve long fought for the inclusion of accurate, public salary ranges in job postings. It is nominally the law here in California, although infrequently enforced (I’ve written to the enforcement agency about giving them an automated tool to identify offenders for free; they’ve never written back – I’m looking at you, Lilia Garcia-Brower).

And the research is blazingly clear: public, narrow salary ranges consistently shrink wage gaps, by creating clear anchors and reducing reliance on individual negotiation (which tends to favor overrepresented groups).

But when candidates ignore the posted ranges, the benefits drop away. If there is an expectation of disregarding public salaries, companies are disincentivized from being accurate; it benefits them to post low ranges in order to reduce the anchor point and harvest the most candidate data. Which puts us right back in the same place: overrepresented groups will ignore the ranges and negotiate, underrepresented groups won’t, and wage gaps will persist.

And it goes beyond just the wage gap. While not a perfectly zero-sum game, hiring requires resources that are not infinite; when someone takes up space in the hiring process with no intention of accepting, they deny consideration to other candidates who are willing to work at the posted salary. Katie’s candidate could have dropped out in the first round, allowing us to advance someone else who felt the tradeoff between value creation and compensation was equitable.

It is absolutely good and reasonable to not take jobs that don’t fully compensate you for the value you create and it is beneficial to both workers and employers when salaries are fair. And if you believe that (I do!), the single best thing you can do as a job seeker to create that outcome is to insist that companies post accurate public salary ranges and then only apply to jobs where you consider that tradeoff fair. The power of workers has always been in what they refuse to do, so stop applying to what you won’t accept.