There is a move being run on senior candidates right now, and it needs a name. I call it the late lowball.
I have now watched it happen to more than one senior person I work with, in the same month. It wears the costume of transparency but it's damn sure the opposite of it.
What changed this year
Pay Transparency arrived in Europe. Companies are now expected to show salary information on their vacancies, and many have started publishing ranges. On the surface, this looks like progress, and in some places it genuinely is. The interval is public. The benchmark is visible. The candidate finally knows what the role pays before investing weeks in a process.
That was the idea.
The confirmation
Here is the sequence I am watching instead. It has repeated almost identically in every case that reached me.
A vacancy goes out with a published range, and the range looks fair, close to the real market for the role. A senior candidate applies. Early in the process, they ask the sensible question, and they are told, verbally, that their expectation sits comfortably inside the interval. Sometimes in the middle of it. Everyone relaxes. The process continues. Interviews go well.
Then the offer arrives. Now, if the number came in at the bottom of the published range, that would already be a betrayal of the middle they confirmed. That is not what I am seeing. The offers landing on the people I work with this month came in below the range entirely. Not the low end of the interval. Under it. The company published a floor, confirmed a comfortable middle, and then offered beneath its own floor.
Come on! You published the floor yourselves!
The other version of the same trick
There is a second variant, and it hunts senior people specifically.
The advertised role is senior. Senior title, senior scope, senior range. Senior candidates apply, because that is who the ad was built to attract. Then somewhere between the last interview and the offer letter, the role quietly changes shape. The title comes back one level lower than the one advertised. And with the junior title comes the junior money, delivered with a straight face, as if this were always the role.
The candidate spent the whole process negotiating for one job. The offer is for a different one.
Why this works on senior people
By offer stage, you have invested weeks. You have told your family. You have imagined the start date. You may have cooled other processes because this one was moving. The company knows all of this, and the late lowball is priced on it: the cost of walking away has been growing the entire time, and the offer lands at the exact moment that cost peaks.
I am going to be direct about why this makes me angry: by the time the late lowball lands, most of these people have been searching for months. The runway that felt comfortable in January is gone. And someone on the other side knows that, and prices the offer on it. I sat in rooms where offers were built. This is not clumsy budgeting. It is timing.
The published range did its job weeks earlier. It got you in the door. Nothing in the process that followed was attached to it.
What a verbal confirmation is worth
I spent sixteen years inside regulated financial services, first running operations, then leading HR and hiring, so let me say this as plainly as I can : a verbal confirmation about salary, made mid-process by someone in the pipeline, commits the company to nothing. The person who said it may have believed it. The budget holder who signs the offer was not in that conversation. Until a number is written in an offer document, there is no number. There are only words, and in every case I have watched this month, the words did not survive to offer stage.
What you can do
I work with these people now. I used to sit on the side that made the offers. I know which side of this is behaving badly, and I am not going to write about it politely. But anger alone does not protect you, so here is what does.
- You cannot force a company to honour its own advertisement. What you can do is take away the trick's favourite conditions.
- Ask early, and ask precisely: not "is my expectation in range," but "which point in the published range is budgeted for this role at my level of experience?" (a vague question invites a comfortable answer; a precise one forces a real one, or a visible dodge, and the dodge itself is information).
- When the title shifts, stop the process and name it. A changed title is a changed role is a changed negotiation. Continuing as if nothing happened tells them the downgrade worked.
- And when the offer lands below the range itself, remember that the published range is your ally now. It is their own public statement of what this role is worth. Reference it calmly and hold them to their own words.
Some companies publishing ranges are doing this honestly, and it should be said. But an interval on an advertisement is a promise about a conversation, not about an outcome. The number that matters is the one on the offer letter.
And I want to ask you something directly, because my cases are only the ones I can see. If you are in a process right now, or have been these past few months, did the number on the offer match the range on the advertisement?
I read every reply, and what you tell me shapes what I write about next.
Anca
