>>> That makes me think that your company's pay scales are too low.
>>
>> I don't know about that. I don't think our adverts actually state what
>> we might be willing to pay. It's possible that we're not paying *the
>> recruiters* enough money, of course... They all seem pretty disappointed
>> that we will only pay them a 6% cut (they seem to be looking for nearer
>> 40%).
>
> I think it's a plus to put your pay range in the advert.

Only if it's good. If you actually do pay peanuts, it's probably best 
not to advertise that fact.

> If I see an
> advert that doesn't mention salary or says something wooly like
> £excellent then I'll generally ignore it. If I saw something that looked
> interesting that I cold do and it said £<my_current_salary+X> then I
> might get in contact.

I agree.

IME, recruiters are scum. If I see £excellent, it just looks like BS to 
me. It always astonishes me that employers expect your CV to be this 
immaculate work of art or they won't hire you - and then they themselves 
post job adverts that look like arse...

...and then I saw my boss write a job advert, and the job agent 
completely changed it all *for absolutely no reason*. Broke all the 
sentences, screwed up the grammar, rearranged everything so it had no 
logical order, and inserted lots of BS sentences about "excellent 
company culture" which mean precisely nothing and just make it look like 
you have nothing real to say. They also *removed* several critical, 
non-negotiable requirements from the advert. (I'm talking about *legal* 
requirements - stuff we legally can't waive.)

Naturally, we called them to demand why they took our perfectly good 
advert and messed it up. After several iterations, we gave up trying to 
make the actual published advert not look like arse.

All these recruiters seem to do is run Google searches for CV documents 
who's buzzword content vaguely matches the buzzword content of the job 
spec. They all *claim* to be doing all this candidate vetting stuff for 
you, and yet we still end up interviewing people who don't know what 
"operating system" means. And yet, the recruiters think we're going to 
pay them 40%? Er, NO!

> FWIW (if the pay scales here for software are the same as hardware) then
> graduates/no experience people would be earning £25-30k

Glad to know my salary isn't *completely* crazy...

A while back I did find a site with some statistics on this. (Damned if 
I can remember where though...) Their data was based on *advertised* 
salary for new hires. [Presumably nobody ever gets paid what it actually 
says in the advert.] But the histograms seemed to suggest that for a C# 
programmer in Milton Keynes, the minimum is around £25k, the lower 
quartile is about £29k, the median is around £34k, and I forget the 
upper quartile. It was a year or two ago now, so I may be remembering 
this wrong [and market rates may of course have changed].

I do recall suggesting to our boss that I go show the graph to the head 
of finance. Everybody agreed it would be utterly *hilarious* to see the 
look on her face - you know, for the remaining 17 seconds of my 
employment with the company...

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