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by aldarn 3388 days ago
I'm not sure this really addresses the issue? Personally I actually would appreciate the upfront salary discussion as it could potentially save a lot of wasted time.

It seems to me the issue is more there was a difference in expectations between what the candidate perceived was their situation and what the recruiter believed. This is of course not uncommon, however from the sounds of it the candidate was not given an opportunity to reason their position. It could be that GitLab is simply not offering competitive renumeration based on what the candidate believed they could achieve in the same market. It could also be that GitLab undervalued the particular skill sets of the candidate. Of course the opposite may also be true.

Clearly there were differences in opinions, however by asking the candidate to sign an agreement to a specific salary based on no discussion is only going to cause issues for everyone. Either the candidate agrees, goes through the interview and decides "it's not worth it, and now there's no flexibility", they disagree and a potentially good candidate is immediately lost or they agree, take the job and feel like they are not being fairly compensated, which can have all sorts of consequences.

This is usually why the discussion happens at the end of an interview process, after the candidate has had the opportunity to demonstrate their skills and experience. Then if there is still a perception of a mismatch this can be reasoned with respect to what has previously been discussed.

> Secondly, we never would ask you to agree to something that is below the calculators suggestion, however your expectations based on Level, Experience, or Location may differ from the recruiter or hiring managers' assessments.

The candidate has clearly stated they were offered less than what the calculator suggested. It was your recruiters opinion that they did not meet the parameters entered into the calculator, however clearly the candidate believed that they did. In this case the recruiter must judge the cause of the disparity through discussion with the candidate and set expectations in terms of the results of this discussion. Again, simply telling a candidate "this is our opinion, you must agree to it" is not going to benefit anyone.

1 comments

Just to be clear: the calculator takes Level, Experience, and Location into account. If the candidate and recruiter arrive at different numbers while typing into the calculator, then there is apparently miscommunication about one or more of those factors. But being asked to agree to something that is lower than what comes out of the calculator is just not something we do at GitLab. If it came across that way then something got lost in the communication.

Matt, since I deal with the comp calculator every now and then, if you'd like to provide more specifics of your situation, can you please email me on ernst@gitlab.com ?

I want to second this, we should never ask people to agree to something below the calculator. But of course the applicant and the interviewer might disagree about the appropriate title and experience factor for a candidate.

We have to decline 200 applicants a week at GitLab. We realize that interviewing is very stressful. We send a survey afterwards to get a net promoter score. The current average is 4.2 out of 5 for people that did not sign with us. Most applicants don't fill out the survey, we're not sure how that influences results.

You are saying most people don't do the survey and I think also most would think it matters how they rate the company for their own future prospects. 4.2 is actually pretty low considering this.
If you're actually calculating an NPS, the non-respondents should be considered detractors for a more accurate rating. Happy to talk more if you're interested (have done a lot of this as a user researcher).
Cool! Thanks for the offer for help. Can you maybe reach out to joan@gitlab.com?
Your calculator would probably need to be updated? I just tried it out and the difference between the locations Mumbai and Bangalore, the latter is close to 2.5x less than Mumbai (0.08 vs 0.20).

Your data-source for this is very clearly wrong.. any income/cost-of-living report for India will show that the cost of living is the same for these 2 cities.

Just FYI.