Pay transparency: what job offers should look like

Recruitment advertisements and job titles will also have to be adapted according to the new requirements of the recent European directive on pay transparency.

Directive (EU) 2023/970, which will have to be transposed by Romania in the next few years, aims to apply the principle of equal pay for equal work or work of equal value between men and women and to prohibit discrimination, and this means focusing on as much pay transparency as possible.

The directive does not promise employees that they will have the right to know what each other’s salaries are, the current level of transparency will have to be improved so that workers receive information on their own level of pay and on the average levels of pay, broken down by gender, for categories of workers doing the same work as them or work of equal value as theirs.

The Directive imposes the need for transparency from the moment before an employment relationship is established: transparency for candidates in the recruitment process.

Employers will have two obligations here:

• put in the job advertisement the starting level from which the salary and other components of the monthly remuneration start – either in a fixed amount or by using a range, which is in fact a negotiating range; employers should not opt here for using an extremely wide range; using an extremely wide range does not achieve the purpose of this transparency desideratum – that of informed negotiation.

• the second obligation is more about gender equality – vacancy notices and job titles must be gender neutral.