Disclosing your salary

by Marissa
(Boston, MA, USA)

I am applying for positions hospital research labs. They want the application filled out with past salary. This makes me very uncomfortable. This seems to me to be showing your hand before the bid is placed. Yet they are insisting that all information be presented to them before an offer will be made.

Any suggestions.

Response from Carl: Good question, Marissa. Disclosing your salary on an application or early on in the job interview process is often looked upon as showing your hand, just like you mention. Of course, there are really two options here as I'm sure you already know:

1. You can disclose previous salary history truthfully and hope that it doesn't impact your candidacy in a negative way.

2. You can choose not to disclose your salary history and hope that it doesn't impact your candidacy in a negative way.

Either way, you're taking a chance because you really don't know how the information you provide will be received. Does having a salary history where you show a progression of increased salary help you? Does not having this progression hurt? Who knows? It's really up to the person or people receiving your application to decide this so it's hard to do anything other than guess.

I don't know how formal the application process is ie. will leaving certain information off the application automatically disqualify you? I'd hate to suggest leaving off the information only to find out that it disqualifies you from consideration. Eventually the information will undoubtedly come out so perhaps adding your salary history in is the best way to proceed unless you're 100% certain that leaving it out will not hurt you.

Carl