National Inclusion Week 2022: Otta talks pay transparency
Earlier this year we announced a pilot scheme where participating employers list salary details on job adverts and stop asking about salary history during recruitment.
This scheme will seek to improve pay transparency in the job application process and help businesses who want to go even further in attracting women to their positions. Evidence shows listing a salary range on a job advert and not asking applicants to disclose salary history provides a firm footing for women to negotiate pay on a fairer basis. This could have a significant impact in closing salary gaps and tackling pay inequality.
Otta was founded in 2019 and connects job candidates with opportunities at fast-growing tech companies. What was the inspiration behind the company?
Our spark for Otta came when we started asking people at job interviews: “How was your job search?”. We expected mundane answers, but instead heard incredibly emotive things.
People said that they found searching for jobs soul-crushing, that they hated LinkedIn and recruiters, and felt like second-class citizens with how companies treated them.
After researching the industry, it became clear to us that the best innovation was focused on helping companies fill vacancies. But there was very little innovation for candidates looking for jobs. This seemed backwards to us. And so the experience of looking for a job still feels like it’s stuck in the classifieds era.
But people want more from their jobs nowadays — flexibility, an inspiring mission, inclusivity and shared values.
So, shouldn’t finding a job demand a different experience? We set out to build a product that prioritises candidates and what they care about. Our mission is to be a career champion and help people find fulfilment and we’re currently building a better way to find a job in tech.
It’s National Inclusion Week. 45% of your candidates identify as female and 38% are from underrepresented ethnic groups (1). What are you doing at Otta to make sure that candidates are paid fairly?
We are huge believers that having salary ranges on job adverts is a big step forward for helping people be paid fairly. It holds companies accountable to decide a salary up front. And if you know the range for the role, you can have fair and concrete conversations, for example “What would it take for me to be paid at the top end of the range?”.
We have seen research that stating a salary range also helps women to negotiate a fairer pay deal. To raise awareness, we’ve paid for billboards that read:
“If the salary is so competitive, why don’t you tell me what it is?”
and
“If you really care about the gender pay gap, why aren’t you putting salaries on your job adverts?”
We’re trying to be the voice of candidates, who tell us their #1 frustration in looking for jobs is not knowing the salary. We think we can play a part in getting the conversation moving by shouting about the problem.
On Otta, any job that has a salary range is shown before those that don’t. This is our way of incentivising good behaviour by companies on our platform. We often get asked “If you care so much, why don’t you block any jobs if they don’t have salary ranges?”. Unfortunately, that would lead to a large percentage of jobs being removed, and when we speak to our candidates they’d rather have plenty of opportunities to apply to.
On International Women’s Day, we announced a pay transparency pilot and working group to level up job opportunities across the UK. What are the main benefits of advertising salaries for businesses and candidates?
The main benefit for businesses is that they are going to attract more applications. On the Otta platform, job postings with a salary range see a 42% uplift in the number of saves and applications. That’s no different for underrepresented groups, so this is a very effective method to get more applications from women and ethnic minorities.
As the topic of salary transparency builds more and more momentum, having salaries on job adverts is also a clear signal to potential candidates that a company is forward-thinking and taking steps to be a fairer employer.
How transparent is the tech sector compared to other sectors — is there more that needs to be done?
The tech sector is typically quicker at adopting more progressive ideas about the work environment. For example, before the pandemic there were many tech companies that already offered flexible working. And so, we are seeing more progress on salary transparency in tech than in other sectors.
But there is still so much work to be done in tech. 90% of job adverts in tech still don’t have salary ranges.
Does disclosing salary history impact your candidates? Fawcett Society data says that 58% of women feel they receive a lower salary offer when they’ve been asked to disclose their salary during the job application process (2).
The conversation shouldn’t be about what someone was paid before. It disadvantages women in particular; they’re more likely to be paid less than men, so asking about their previous salary just builds on that inequality.
More girls are studying STEM subjects at school, but females make up just 30.9% of the STEM workforce (3). How can we get more women into tech and how can tech businesses support women to progress in their careers?
There are now thousands of women at the beginning of their technical careers, after graduating with STEM degrees, or completing coding schools like General Assembly or Le Wagon.
But there is a chicken-and-egg problem in the hiring of many technical roles. Companies want engineers, product managers or data scientists who have had a few years of experience, but they aren’t willing to train someone who has no experience. And so we’re left with a problem!
To solve this, companies need to be more willing to take on entry-level and junior people and give them a shot at their first role. Big companies are already doing this, as they have the resources to take on graduate cohorts. However, smaller and fast-growing companies are still reluctant to hire anyone that isn’t experienced.
We will continue to have an issue with women in tech at more established levels if we’re not willing to train the junior talent.
What is the Government doing to support women’s economic empowerment?
- Launching a pay transparency pilot and working group to close salary gaps.
- Announcing a new ‘returners’ programme to support women into STEM roles after taking time out to care for loved ones, adding to 25 previous returner programmes across the private and public sector.
- Setting an ambition to increase the number of female entrepreneurs by half by 2030 in response to the 2019 Rose Review, and launching a Taskforce to support them.
Launching a new STEM returners programme to help women into STEM roles after taking time out to care for loved ones.
- Otta website
- 2. Fawcett Society Equal Pay Day 2021 Survey
- 3. Equality Hub analysis of the Annual Population Survey (2021)
