Ask HN: Salary history in background check

It's perfectly reasonable for you to decline to provide that information. It's also perfectly for them to decline to provide employment (or consulting business) on the basis of it.

I also don't like to provide these numbers; my usual (in my view, perfectly ethnical and justified) dodge goes as follows:

(1) I give them 1 or 2 numbers that are easily verifiable -- and which I don't mind being "leaked" -- e.g. FT salaries at bigcorps in the past few years. This is in accordance with basic game theory / negotiating strategy (whereby if you make a partial concession to people, they feel they have an "out" and and can save face, rather than press you for a full concession to what they were asking for).

(2) As to the rest, I say "my clients / employers have asked that this information be kept confidential, and I'd like to honor their requests."

Your suggestion to raise the issue of unintentional leaks (due to concerns about cloud security) is quite excellent, and I may incorporate it into my dodge strategy, also.

The bottom line is that most of the people asking are basically drones who don't really know why they're asking, just that someone told them to (or they have some vague sense that it will provide them with some kind of negotiating leverage).

At the end of day, you don't have to play their games -- but keep in mind that you'll incur a 30% or so automatic rejection chance for doing so, across the board. My gut feeling is that companies that are sticklers aren't really all that desirable to work for, anyway.

Background checks should only happen after you accept the employment offer and full compensation package. Then it doesn't matter if they discover you made $24,000 last year but now they hired you for $250,000 per year this year.

The background check is unavoidable. It's a liability maneuver for the employer. The most invasive check I've had is them just requiring two years of prior tax returns (I think to verify employment because the previous employers no longer existed).

As far as wording about your private data being hacked in the future, that's just the world we live in. You can't avoid it if you want to live within current societal normals. (Also, for many jobs, salary information is fully public like all government positions.)

Don't provide the information if it makes you feel uncomfortable. It is none of their business, did they provide you with the salary of the guy you are replacing? If they decide to halt the hiring process because the 3-rd party reported that you did not comply you should be happy you didn't end up working for this company.

Do past employers actually provide this?

My past employer in the UK was absolutely clear to everyone that joined something like "For staff that resign, we will only verify date an duration of tenure, and department and position title. All current serving staff are prohibited from providing references and endanger their position by doing so, etc..."

Living in China, and with both very large and smaller companies (international and local) in HR or close-to-HR functions, the HR manager would most likely meet this request with the delete key on their keyboard, or at best a canned response.

I share this because I'm surprised employers would actually disclose this, for how it can feed back on their own operations (for example, a predatory competitor using this information).

Governor Brown vetoed AB1017. This would have prohibited employers from asking for salary history. It would have been interesting to see the reaction of employers if this has been signed by the governor.

I've had a company say they will "verify" my salary for my first internship. How is this possible that they verify it? Essentially, it is not public information.