A state passes a pay transparency law, and a company keeps posting ranges as wide as $60,000 to $120,000 to protect its room to negotiate. Employees read the job postings for their own roles. Some complain that new hires earn more than they do, and others ask for the top of the range. Host Rebecca Taylor brought that scenario to Ami Graves, CHRO at Bell Techlogix. Ami started with the posting itself: “60 to 120K is not an actual range for a position.”

A range that wide defeats the purpose of posting one. Ami located an earlier failure: a pay audit that should have happened before any range went public. The fix also belongs to managers and budget owners, not to HR alone.

Why a 100 Percent Spread Is Not a Range

Ami did the math out loud. A range that doubles from bottom to top spans 100 percent. Anyone working in compensation or HR, she argued, would know it fits no job level. Her rough benchmark for how wide a salary range should be was 40 or 50 percent. New York’s posting law defines the range as the minimum and maximum pay the employer in good faith believes to be accurate at the time of posting.

Posting huge ranges to keep negotiating room, she said, misses the point: “That negates the whole purpose of pay transparency.” Employees do not read a spread that wide as compensation design. They read it as a question about their own pay, and Ami called that fair.

A real range also tells people where they stand. In Ami’s account, the bottom is for people still learning the job, the middle for those doing all of it, and the top for high performers with long tenure. A compa ratio calculation puts that placement in numbers by comparing a salary with the range midpoint.

Why Hiding Pay Costs More Than It Saves

Ami was candid about why employers hesitate to post ranges. The generous reading is fear of losing a strong candidate. That candidate sees a $120,000 cap, wants $150,000, and never applies, even though the company might have paid more for a rare skill. The less generous reading is a company that wants to pay as little as it can.

For that second group, her warning was blunt. An underpaid hire gains twelve months of experience, then leaves to be paid what they are worth, which makes the employer “the quickest stepping stone ever.” Ami counted the cost of turnover in money, training hours, and strain on clients. By Gallup’s estimate, replacing a single employee can cost anywhere from half to twice that person’s annual salary.

Ami tied her stance on haggling to her own first offer. Offered $20,000 for her first real job, she asked the recruiter what to counter with, then countered with the recruiter’s number, $21,000. For the last ten years, she said, she has stayed out of back-and-forth salary negotiation. She leads with the strongest offer the company can make, because a strong offer tells a candidate “out of the gate, we want you.”

What Actually Works

Run the Pay Audit Before the Ranges Go Public

Ami’s first fix comes before any posting. An internal audit should look for wage gaps by gender, race, or disability. It should not wait for a law to force it. Her own company was doing that work before transparency rules spread, and it still does. The EEOC notes that Title VII, the ADEA, and the ADA prohibit compensation discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or disability.

A year of lead time is the window to close gaps in steps rather than one jump at the deadline. Ami also urges HR to watch other states, since a company with no employees there today may have some in six months.

Put Finance and P&L Owners at the Table

Ami was direct about the money. One raise looks small, but across hundreds of employees the adjustments can run to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Most leaders want to do right by their people, she said, and they also carry margin targets.

So she brings in the leaders who own the P&L, plus finance, and legal only if it gets to that point. The fix is a budget decision, which is why effective compensation planning belongs on the finance calendar rather than in the complaint queue.

Give Managers the Words for Pay Questions

Ami counts weak manager coaching among the biggest mistakes HR teams make here. Front-line managers tell employees that HR set their pay or blocked a raise. She sees a gap in preparation more than in will, since many were never taught how compensation works.

Her favorite managers ask HR to explain compensation so they can lead better. Treating pay as one of the tough conversations at work gives managers that practice before a posting forces the issue.

Where Employee Relations Fits

Complaints after a posting are employee relations work. When an employee says a new hire earns more for the same job, the complaint points to salary compression across tenure levels. Some of those claims carry a discrimination question underneath, and the case record has to show which one this is.

Ami warned against assuming the existing ranges are wrong because employees are upset, since most placement decisions can be defended. That defense rests on documentation, from the audit to the reason for each placement and the answer given. Logging each complaint as a case also shows trends by manager and location and separates one outlier from a pattern.

Frequently Asked Questions About Pay Transparency Ranges

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

Ami’s framing is worth keeping close: a posted range is “meant to be helpful to candidates” and “not meant to be hurtful to companies.” Companies that audit before they post get to explain their ranges; companies that skip the audit end up defending them. The posting did not create the pay gap. It exposed one.

Ami Graves is equally clear about HR’s place. HR explains the risk and advocates for both the employee and the business, and she refuses to act as “the compliance police.” The decisions belong to business leaders, made with HR’s guidance.

See how AllVoices helps People teams track pay complaints as cases and answer each one with a documented rationale.