Executive Summary

• The data centre industry should have transparency as its core promise, but hidden salary bands in job adverts are killing trust. This issue isn’t industry-specific, but there are extra consequences that are a huge factor in the skills shortage.
• As the UK government are making the move to ban hidden pay scales on job adverts to eliminate unfair wage gaps, should the industry start early to close the recruitment gap it faces?
• Hiding salary bands is often viewed in today’s job market as a red flag (we love those). It is a sign that the company offers unequal pay for equal work or underpays existing staff.

Clients are given 99.999% uptime guarantees, there are real-time power usage effectiveness (PUE) metrics, and more ways to measure water and carbon usage, yet the recruitment practices are stuck in the Dark Ages.

Most job boards in the UK have the majority of job adverts stating “salary competitive, based on experience” written on them, and this isn’t just an issue specifically in the data centre industry: it’s all across the board. Do you know what candidates would do, upon seeing that in a job advert? Likely to scroll past and never apply. Why? If they’re applying for dozens of jobs, tailoring every resume and writing a unique cover letter, why would they go through that without knowing the salary range? Sitting through the selection and interview process, before even finding out the salary, is incredibly backwards and potentially a huge waste of time for everyone involved. Then it’s a congratulations to the company that may have filtered out any outstanding candidates just by hiding pay behind the corporate curtain. It’s outdated, a huge candidate filter, and it’s on the verge of becoming illegal across the UK and Europe.

The clock is counting down the weeks before EU and UK policy reforms shift, disclosing salary on job adverts from a “best practice” to law. Let’s dive into what that means.

The EU Pay Transparency Directive requires mandatory pre-interview pay disclosures and bans employers from asking candidates about past salary history. It builds on the mandatory Gender  Pay Gap reporting for employers with 250+  staff, so it can ban unfair wage gaps before contracts are signed. If data centres are priding themselves on operational visibility and transparency, then they should be setting the standard for pay transparency also.

Candidates will scroll past

That’s a fact. The job market is incredibly tough right now, with multiple rounds of interviews, unpaid tasks (now that’s another can of worms right there), the confusing, contradictory advice on how to get your resume “right” and how to “pass” interviews. Not to mention applying for dozens of jobs, only to get ghosted by most of them.

Skilled engineers won’t complete three rounds of interviews, only to find the salary range is £10k lower than their current salary. Hiding salary bands is often viewed in today’s job market as a red flag (we love those). It is construed as a sign that the company offers unequal pay for equal work or underpays existing staff. Furthermore, it perpetuates historic wage gaps by forcing candidates to blindly negotiate.

Does the data centre industry want to be painted like this? It needs to get ahead of the law early and send a message to other industries, encouraging them to follow suit. Establish internal pay bands and evaluate candidates against them, and state the base range plus any benefits instead of the age-old “competitive salary” slogan. Oh and speaking of benefits, occasional pizza and vague mentions of some kind of benefits aren’t actual benefits – it’s barely the bare minimum, and there needs to be a clear breakdown of pension matches, OT rates, on-call allowances, car allowance, private healthcare, life insurance, etc.