Wages, transparency starts with recruitment
The obligation to indicate the starting salary in advertisements is coming. It will be forbidden to ask applicants how much they earned in their previous post. Italia and Slovakia are the first two countries to transpose the new rules. France, Germany and Spain still lag behind
Candidates participating in a selection for a job will have the right to know the starting salary or the salary range in which the position falls. This information must be provided in the advertisements and notices in which job opportunities are communicated. Furthermore, it will be forbidden to ask the candidate how much he or she earned in the previous job. These are the first two innovations expected to debut with the entry into force in June of the decree transposing EU directive 2023/970 on wage transparency. The aim of the directive is to strengthen the enforcement of equal pay between men and women, for the same job or for a job 'of equal value', precisely through wage transparency.
Italia is the first major European country to cross the transposition threshold (so far only Slovakia has done so): the draft implementing legislative decree was finally approved by the Council of Ministers on 30 April. Almost all the major European countries are still at the stage of drafting implementing legislation (see the map on the page with data from Ius Laboris).
The impact on selections
Employment agencies, which handle both personnel searches for companies and the administration of workers, are preparing for the debut of the new rules, and some have already begun to align their ads with the new requirements. "Eighty per cent of our job advertisements," explains Sirra Arnoldi, Legal & corporate affairs director at Randstad Italia, "already state the salary to be offered to candidates or the salary range. It is important for companies to indicate not only the gross annual salary but the entire salary package, which also includes variable remuneration, benefits and so on'.
Even at Adecco, the process of compliance with the directive has already begun, as Claudio Soldà, Vice President Public affairs and CSR at The Adecco Group Italy, explains. "So far, 10% of our advertisements contain an indication of remuneration," he explains. 'The reason for such a low percentage,' he adds, 'is that when we are looking for a professional figure in an area, in order to propose it to companies, we publish an ad that cannot yet contain a precise indication of the salary. Moreover, if it is a company that asks us to recruit a worker, it does not always give us a specific economic indication. From now on, however, it will be mandatory'.
The ban on asking candidates for their previous salary will, according to the industry, serve to avoid perpetuating any disadvantageous conditions, especially for female workers. "Since they are often forced into discontinuous work," Claudio Soldà of Adecco goes on to explain, "female candidates sometimes have to refer to salaries received years earlier, and so, if the new salary is brought into line with that, they are penalised. In other words, they run the risk that they will not be offered the salary that the company would have offered a male candidate with a continuous professional career behind him'.
