Pay transparency is coming — and worth doing anyway

The EU Pay Transparency Directive (Directive (EU) 2023/970) sets new rules on pay transparency and equal pay, and member states are turning it into national law ahead of a transposition deadline of 7 June 2026. Some reporting duties scale with company size and phase in over time, so the smallest teams carry the lightest load — but the recruitment-stage basics apply broadly.

Check your own country’s implementation for the exact detail, since the directive sets a floor that national law builds on. The direction, though, is settled: pay should be clearer to candidates, and harder to set in ways that can’t be explained.

A few things matter at the hiring stage. Candidates should be given the starting salary or range for a role before or early in the process, rather than discovering it at the end. You shouldn’t ask candidates about their current or past pay. And the criteria you use to set pay should be objective and gender-neutral, which means you need to be able to describe how you arrive at a number.

None of this requires a compensation team. It requires deciding the range before you advertise, and being honest with yourself about how you set it.

Publishing a range isn’t only compliance; it’s a better filter. Candidates who are a poor fit for the level self-select out, and the ones who apply have already accepted the bracket. That tends to mean fewer late surprises and shorter, calmer negotiations.

It also builds trust. A role that states its range reads as a company that has thought about fairness, which is exactly the impression you want to give the people you hope to hire.

You can get most of the benefit with three changes:

1. Add a salary range to every job post. Decide it before publishing, and make it real rather than impossibly wide.
2. Remove salary-history questions from your forms and interviews, and ask teammates not to raise them informally.
3. Write down how you set pay for each role — the factors and the reasoning — so you can explain a number if asked.

These are small, and they prepare you for the rules without waiting for the deadline to force a scramble.

Rolefern’s branded careers pages and job descriptions are where the range belongs — visible on the role, consistent with what your team actually offers. Keeping the range on the public page, next to the work and the process, is the simplest way to make transparency routine rather than a special effort.

Revisit the range if a role changes during the search, and keep the public page honest about it. Transparency works when the number people see is the number you mean.