NEED your Help! New Employer

Having dealt with this about two years ago...

I offered that if the potential employer wasn't willing to open a discussion about my prospective salary based upon my abilities, experience, and the national averages for similarly employed professionals, I wasn't interested in pursuing employment with them further.

I called their bluff.

We discussed salaries and I got my way. If I hadn't, I'd have walked. An employer who isn't willing to openly discuss salary without basing it on previous employer's possibly faulty salary structures isn't an employer with any sort of future.

Determine how badly you need the job, and whether it will be a temporary employment until you can do better. Base your decision on that.

As for me, I'd never show any prospective employer any check stubs, and they can't get that info from your current employer by calling them.

Gary,

I posed your question to my wife, who has a degree in HR and is the HR person for her company. She said it isn't illegal for them to ask for this information. If you are worried about private info like SS numbers and the such, they will get that anyway if they hire you, so if you are trying to hide something they will find out eventually. She was curious if you provided your current salary information to your employer on your application or your resume. If so, she thinks that maybe they are trying to verify whether you provided them with accurate information or not and to see how honest you are before hiring you. While a lot of companies do back ground checks and the such, they still want to verify your honesty. Personally I would be a little pissed they would have the nads to ask for such a thing, I am sure they have their reasons. My wife said they have recently changed their policies regarding degrees. Now they actually contact the schools to verify degrees and such where before they trusted people. Hope this helps.

I've had lots of jobs and was never asked to provide proof of past salary.

If you said you had to make at least what you are making (instead of naming a figure), and they agreed to do that plus a little, they may ask such a thing. Or if you are a salesman who is mostly commissioned and have told them you can produce a certain amount, they may want to see proof. But for any kind of salaried or hourly work that you didn't bring your current salary into, I don't get it. If, for instance, you said you can't change jobs for less than $50,000 a year, they have no reason to see what you're making. Maybe you're only making 40 but your current job is close to home or you have earned lots of vacation - whatever the case may be, you are the only one who can decide what it will take for you to move.

If they're making a deal out of salary when hiring you, you may want to ask about annual increases. On my first anniversary with my current employer, I was given an 8% raise - nice! Since then we have a very complicated way to get raises. First, your manager completes a 20 part form rating your performance in each area from 1 to 5. Then all the values are added up and seen as a percentage of total possible points (20 X 5 = 100). Then you get that percentage of whatever the maximum allowed raise is. Even though we have been hitting record earnings and profits for the last five years, the maximum annual increase has been set at 3.5%. Now if you score, say, 80% on the manager's evaluation, which is about the best anyone can do, you get 80% of 3.5%, or 2.8% raise. If you try to take exception with the figure, your manager just holds up the evaluation sheet and says, "Hey, the numbers don't lie?" And that's that.

Who isn't looking for a new job?