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@troll The company’s accounts are interesting but they aren’t going to give you the level of detail you need to determine how much your particular role is worth. You don’t know the company profit margin on the contract/product you will be developing or what kind of penalties they might be in for if they don’t get someone with your skills quickly. So you are working with partial information when you calculate your ‘ask’ just like the company is working on partial information when they calculate their ‘bid’.
The company is perfectly entitled to have a ‘feel’ for how much the job is worth taking into account how much they are paying others and to base their ‘bid’ on that (if HR in a group of large companies start determining ‘industry norms’ and agreeing they won’t exceed them that is a lot more dodgy). Similarly the employee can have a feel about what they think their services are worth and base their ‘ask’ on that rather than on what they are making now. Using the tax system to force an supplier – in this case a potential employee – to disclose true values for information which they would prefer to keep confidential because it weakens their negotiating position is not fair.
When you attend an interview, the employer has very little time or information on which to base their assessment of your skills. Previous earnings is one of the only pieces of hard data that expresses the informed view often of one’s direct competitor. Why would you not insist on knowing that information? Recruitment errors are extremely costly.
@troll As the employer you are basically trying to set up an unfair information imbalance in the negotiation. You want to know the potential employees salary to determine their bottom line. You aren’t about to let them see detailed budget numbers for your company so they can see your bottom line i.e. how much their labour is actually worth. In a fair negotiation either both sides show their hand or neither does.Using the P45 to circumvent this is unethical if not illegal. That is confidential personal data and it’s being supplied for the purpose of complying with tax law but you are using it for a completely different purpose and one that disadvantages the employee. Only the people that need that data to process taxes should see it and they should only use it to do the payroll calculations.
There was a series of lawsuits in silicon valley about anti-competitive HR practice where employees found their salaries were being artificially pushed down by an agreement between companies to enforce ‘norms’ and avoid bidding against each other. Referencing against pay from previous employment to make sure nobody can get a big raise by switching jobs is fundamentally anti-competitive: it’s employers colluding to prevent employees getting what a free market would give them.
