Salaries in job advertisements: Employers usually leave IT experts in the dark
People don't talk about money - analysis shows that this also applies to salary details in job advertisements in Germany. This is especially rare for IT jobs.
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Salary details in job advertisements are anything but common in Germany – and the number is particularly low in IT, according to an analysis by the job platform Indeed. According to the analysis, on average, only 7.1 percent of advertisements for IT jobs provide salary details. Software development brings up the rear with 6.7 percent. Together with industrial engineering, job advertisements for developers even had the lowest proportion of job advertisements with salary details in Europe.
Salaries in IT are often negotiated individually, whereas in other sectors, collective agreements often ensure greater transparency and equality, explained Lisa Feist, labor market expert at Indeed. “Especially in IT, where the salary ranges are very wide, this leads to considerable differences,” Feist explained.
High pay, high lack of transparency
In general, the better-paid jobs in particular lack transparency. There is more room for negotiation there – but also greater salary differences. Low-paid jobs, on the other hand, are more transparent than high-paid jobs. Across countries, jobs in the cleaning services and transportation sectors are the most transparent.
According to the Indeed analysis, only 15.6 percent of job advertisements in Germany provide salary information across all professions. This puts Germany at the bottom of the list of the most important European economies. A comparison of countries shows that things can be done differently: in the UK, more than two thirds of job advertisements contain salary information, while in France, Ireland, and the Netherlands the figure is 40 to 50 percent.
The EU wants to create more pay transparency
However, German employers will not be able to maintain their tendency towards salary discretion in the long term. This is because the EU wants to shed light on pay transparency with a directive that will be adopted in 2023. Member states must have transposed this into national law by June 2026, but no member state has yet managed to do so. In Germany, this is likely to be the responsibility of the next federal government.
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Among other things, it is envisaged that salary ranges will be stated directly in the job advertisement or before the job interview. Employees are also to be given the right to obtain information about average salary levels in the company. In this way, the EU wants to combat pay discrimination and gender-specific pay gaps, which can also be found in IT.
(axk)
