Another element of the headhunter’s core competence is the strength and depth of his or her own personality.

Headhunters have to survive by their own wits so they better have something to offer. HR clearly will never need to work like this but there are advantages to getting an understanding of how intense this environment is.

The starting point is that headhunters can work for months without any real salary. Many of them work on a salary draw-down system. This system assumes that the monthly payment they receive is a salary advance against hiring success. When they are successful the bonuses are high, but the basic salary is subtracted from the final bonus. So there is often no basic salary for a headhunter to fall back on, and definitely no corporate social welfare system for their old age.

The challenge is as follows: Persuade two groups of people, hiring managers and candidates, to do something that they wouldn’t necessarily do without your input. If you are not the kind of person who can get inside people’s head and persuade them to take action, then you’d better work in a less stressful job. When all of your income depends on this it becomes absolutely critical.

Headhunters operate in a stressful environment where they also have to be basically likeable, while also appearing knowledgable and somewhat authorative in their own domain. This can be a fine line to follow, and the burnout rate is high.
  
  
Deceptive Appearances

The general conception that you get from people outside the recruiting business is that it is all about creating an impression. But it’s not just about physical appearance and dressing well. Yes, headhunters do normally dress well and will normally be among the best dressed people in any roomfull of people (that’s how you spot them). But the good ones do not rely on looks, charm and dress sense to get the job done.

People have an in-built ‘nonsense’ detector that makes sure this kind of approach does not have long-term effectiveness. However, people are susceptible to symbols of authority, and dress is definitely one of them. Headhunters dress well to project that sense of authority, and to create a clear impression that something is going to be done. If they are going to put food on the table, headhunters have to both project authority, and make sure that something gets done.

The weak ones put hugely inflated titles on their business cards. For example, I once received a headhunter’s business card that described him as “Asia Director - Client Services”. Unfortunately, I knew the company had 3 staff in Hong Kong and a 1-person satellite office in Shanghai. 

(By way of explanation, the technical meaning of Director is that you have Managers under you, and they have to have staff under them.)
 
  
Amateur Psychologists

Headhunters are fundamentally looking to match people together. That means that they need to get to know people quickly and focus on the key elements. They have to be inquisitive, and good listeners.

There is a random, instability factor at play in recruiting that makes the final outcome of any search a risk for both sides, recruiter and line manager. But the key factor is whether the two people they are putting together would be able to work with each other 8 hours a day.

If not, forget it.

Candidates and hiring managers have to like each other, and the headhunter has to be able to spot the ones who will get on, and the ones who won’t. They may not be qualified as such but there is a little bit of the psychologist in every successful headhunter.

They are also joiners. Headhunters tend to be members of Chambers of Commerce, speaking clubs, the Rotary Club etc. Whether they are givers is a different matter, but at the very least they belong.

At best they become officers in these organizations and seek to present themselves as responsible citizens who can work successfully with other people.

Over at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (London, UK), Manpower executive board member David Arkless has just been regalling his audience with his insight into China.

He says that Manpower has 10,000 unfilled job requests on their books in China.

Yes, that is 10,000 positions, and not 1,000, or even 100. It’s quite an admission, and clearly illustrates the huge  scale of the hiring challenge in China. An alternative viewpoint would be that it is not an admission, but a measure of the sheer size of Manpower’s business in China. I’m leaning towards the latter.
 

Willing to Pay

Arkless continued on by saying that companies in China are so desperate to hire staff that when Manpower asks them “how much do you want to pay?” they reply ‘whatever’. Here on the ground we don’t hear exactly this phraseology but there certainly is a high degree of salary flexibility for key positions, and a willingness to pay whatever it takes to get people on board. I can see how he might have heard this phrase more than once.

Manpower’s focus is on temp and junior level positions, in high volume, and this has not been a very lucrative area in China over the last 20 years, simply because the volume did not make up for the low salaries. With average salary increases of 16% per annum over 20 years, that market eventually had to become viable for companies like Manpower. 

The positions that Manpower have open are focused on technicians, and software engineers. Arkless says that they can find the top ones, but that the ones in the middle are difficult. This is consistent with what we see in the educational system, where there are millions of graduates coming out of Chinese universities but nothing equivalent to the German apprenticeship system or the City & Guilds system in the UK.

So China has a lot of systems analysts but not enough electricians, setters and mechanics. Hence the desperation. It is true that there are lots of people in the ‘local’ economy with these kind of skills but they are normally self-taught. This is driven by the need to fix agricultural equipment, repair walls or build houses, not by a desire to graduate with a high-quality technical Diploma.  

Manpower have a solution, of course, and that is to identify what skills are in short supply. This will be done in conjunction with government departments, and the idea is that the civil service can then make the necessary changes to the education system. Arkless does not see a quick solution but he says the situation in China is better because there is recognition of the problem, and a plan in place to solve it.

This begs the question as to why the gap emerged in the first place.

The American Chamber of Commerce in China just issued their 2008 China Business Climate Survey. Meanwhile, the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and the Chinese Academy of Macroeconomic Research (CAMR) also released their own reports on the overall development of the Chinese economy. 

The contrast in styles is illuminating, and may help to shed some light on staff behaviour in China. But let’s get to the reports first.

The CASS report predicts that China’s GDP will grow at a rate of 10.7% this year. The breakdown says that industry will grow at about 12.2% and services 10.9%. Good news all round. Even the inflation monster is held in at under 5.5%. Break out the champagne!.

A slightly different approach is taken by the Chinese Academy of Macroeconomic Research (CAMR), which cites a marked slow down in the first quarter as the US credit crunch bites. Once that’s out of the way we get to the main point, which is that the economy will grow all the way to 2020, and at much the same high rate as previously. So we have somewhat of an improvement in that CAMR report acknowledges a problem immediately, but then returns to the positive news.

The ‘fast growing’ narrative in the two reports wins big time and you can see this from the confidence level in the CAMR and CASS reports. It is striking to hear the economy ‘will grow’ and ‘will increase’; and for another 20 years. A few more ’shoulds’ and ‘balance of probabilities’ might be appreciated.

It reminds me of the old China balance sheets which showed a fixed amount of profits in the future for any China venture, greenfield or pre-existing. This came as a bit of a shock to me when I saw it first. I felt that this did not make sense because I was seeing this after the time when profits could actually be predicted with accuracy. In the pre-opening days, before China opened up 1979, annual output of factories was fixed, to be sure, as was factory costs and the end-user price. Future profits could be determined with simple maths.

Obviously, this was before Deng Xiao Ping opened the floodgates, but for a long time after many economists continued with the old fixed communist models. I was surprised that this kind of thinking still existed over ten years ago, and I thought this thinking must surely be gone now. Some of this false surety still lingers, as the two government reports may be telling us.
  

Analysis & Insight

By comparison, the AmCham report takes a look at the challenges that China faces. The focus is on the day to day difficulties that companies face as they operate in China, not on telling us how great things are.

Overall, their report is broadly positive. Most foreign companies in China are profitable, and the vast majority increased revenues and margins over last year. The challenges are actually much more interesting though, and this always seems to come as a shock to local PRC friends when I say this.

Based on previous conversations that I have had with various audiences and stakeholders in China, this focus on problems is often misunderstood and needs addressing. In the present climate it is easily characterized as biased.

Of course you can easily see where I am going here. Amcham is looking for insight, while the government agencies want to tell us the right story, and confirm the narrative of a fast growing China.

So we are very unlikely to find any challenges in the government agency results, which were a foregone conclusion. There is nothing inherently wrong with the results of these two studies but what is interesting to me is the two different approaches to the same problem.
   

HR’s Problem/Challenge

The linkage to HR is in the way that employees in China deal with work-based problems. Many of the managers I talk to tell me that what they want their staff to do is to give them insight but in many cases all they get is data, and more data. Sometimes they get data that they did not ask for, on the basis that the employee could not find the correct data, and wanted to give them something. It’s a face thing.

Data is something that managers can always find themselves, if they employ enough people or look hard enough. Admittedly, locating data can be difficult in this market, but the point is that it doesn’t take intelligence or creativity; just diligence.

Insight, on the other hand, is in serious short supply in China. The AmCham report drills down through the data and offers up insight because the focus is on doing that.

Management level human resources constraints emerge as the top problem in the AmCham survey, and 71% of members thought that China was losing at least some competitive advantage due to rising costs. However, I would emphasise that very few companies have even considered moving out of China.

About 80% of companies reported difficulty attracting, developing and retaining both managers and skilled workers in China. Capacity expansions were on the table for a lot of companies and 41% are looking at moving to the inner provinces, where labor costs are lower. The possibility of an economic slowdown was the top concern, with labor costs as the second biggest challenge.
  

Demise of Data Providers

The need for staff in China to provide insight has recently become acute. With China reaching the Lewisian Turning Point, productivity is now a real issue, and the responsibility for solving this will rest on HR. We can no longer keep doing the same old same in China, which in the past was to keep throwing labor at every problem.

In order to find out what your company should next do you need to put in place people who can examine what it is that your company is doing wrong now, and then let them go in and fix it. This requires insight and action, and a small proportion of the younger generation gets this. There are also older managers who get this but younger people will provide you with a target rich environment of individuals with the right skills.

Unfortunately, this little group of younger professionals do not have the influence to change things so they need help. Their level of boredom in the office is at least partly due to the fact that they are asked by older, middle level managers for data, when they often have unwelcome insights that cannot get past these middle managers. The gatekeepers keep this generation blocked in, but not forever.

In the long term scenario, this older generation, who are limited purely to finding and presenting data, should be slowly pushed aside. Those who can analyze data and provide insight will survive. HR has to drive this process to its final conclusion.

It can be seen in Darwinian terms, with a new urgency coming from the failure of the current model. Add in the speed of change in the business environment in China right now and you have little or no choice but to move away from data, and towards insight. The good news is that the people with insight are there.

They are probably sitting in your office looking bored.

It’s about the most unlikely source of information about workplace issues in China, but the Journal of Happiness’ recently published study; “The China Puzzle: Falling Happiness in a Rising Economy”, offers a look inside the motivation of people (staff) in China.

The study backs up the notion that people do not necessarily become happier when they become richer, or when their salary increases. This is known as the Easterlin Paradox, and the results of other studies done after the Easterlin Paradox was proposed, show that it is the comparative increase that counts; the increase relative to other people.

(As an aside, the most recent research that I have seen shows that the best way to increase happiness is to give money away, not to acquire it. This might take a while to take root in China as the notion of charity is still not well understood. Some places are happy already though.)
 

Where’s the Happiness?

Happiness in China has simply not increased, despite the average 16% rise in salary year on year. This rate of salary increase has been going on for close on 20 years, so if it is true that increased salary leads to increased happiness we should have seen a positive correlation by now. This study shows the opposite.

Far from increasing in happiness, the average person in China is less happy than 20 years ago. The results of the survey show that 28% of people said they were happy in 1990 but this had dropped to 12% by 2000. This was across all income levels and covered both rural and urban areas. The researchers also did a satisfaction survey and got a figure of 7.3 in 1990 and 6.5 in 2000.

The researchers say that this dissatisfaction is a result of the rich getting richer faster than anyone else. So the emerging middle classes find themselves treading water as the definition of rich keeps moving out of their reach. Generally speaking, it has been shown that the better off are happier than the less well off, but obviously not when you have such a dichotomy.

Ten years ago I remember hearing about the “RMB10,000 Family”. This was an extended family with total assets of RMB10,000 and it was the target for many city residents. Once you got to this level you were well off, and you could relax in the certain knowledge that you were in the leading pack. Needless to say a family with assets of RMB10,000, or RMB100,000 for that matter, is not going to regard this as anything other than failure in present day China. The average apartment in Chinese cities costs way more than this.
  

Anomie

The other issue that the researchers looked at is the rate of change in a society, and how that causes people to feel that they are losing control over their lives. This is known as anomie.  The researchers also looked at corruption and freedom, but again a surprise. No effect. But it is worth noting that other studies found a positive correlation between happiness and government accountability.

Anomie is certainly a strong contender for dissatisfaction in China because the rate of change in China is probably greater than anyone has ever seen before. No country this big has ever changed so much in so short a space of time. It’s not surprising if people feel left behind, and disoriented. 

What does produce additional happiness in individuals, as shown by other research, is the opportunity to take part in new activities, and this is still a big weakness in China, especially in the Western provinces. There is just very little to do here. So the type of change we are seeing in China now does not have the potential that it does in other countries. A lot of it is the wrong kind of change, happiness-wise.

Surprisingly, the anomie effect was stronger in 1990 than it is now, perhaps because the change at that time was new, and frightening. Expectations play a huge role in this. No one at that time knew what the final outcome of the changes would be, and few people had any sense that they could control the direction of that change. By 2000 there was a stronger sense that things were broadly positve, and by then people had more control over their life levers.

People’s concerns then switched to financial issues.
  

The Frustrated Achievers

The researchers have coined the term ‘frustrated achievers’ to describe people who are doing better in China, but who’s position is declining in relation to the average. Much of these people are currently in your office or factory, and these are the people we have to worry about.

They feel pressured by the fact that the rich are moving away from them fast, and they don’t worry about the poor because they feel that the poor are just poor. In the event of something going wrong, like a strong downturn in the economy, the rich will have options and the situation for the poor will not have changed much.

The frustrated achievers feel they will be the ones to really lose. This is for two reasons. First, they have something to lose, and second, they have fewer options to work with in the event of a bad situation. They don’t have the freedom of choice that the rich do, and they don’t have the comfort of ‘Why worry, it’s always been like this.’ that they think the poor can fall back on. This is what they seem to believe anyway.

Clearly, these people have a strong need to feel secure, and perhaps this would explain why 20-something professionals in China are so concerned about the contribution level in their ‘4 Funds’ ie. their pension and medical coverage. This is normally not an issue for most professionals until their 30s, or when they get married. It might also help to explain the high levels of risk aversion seen among professionals in China.

It is certainly helps to explain the desire for increased salary, which is the one area that people have full control of in China.

This new understanding of anomie could offer us the hope that the new share option schemes, that were announced earlier last year by the State Administration for Foreign Exchange (SAFE), would give HR a real crack at increasing satisfaction levels, and lowering turnover. This would be a very positive move because so far nothing else has actually had any real effect on satisfaction or retention.

There is nothing like share certificates in your hot little fist to make you feel rich, or at least well off.

If you want to know more about happiness studies, please take a look at the PsyBlog

It started out two years ago with a viral email that was sent around China showing pictures of the Google offices in Beijing.

They looked pretty much like this first set below. No one is sure who sent the original email but it did a better job of building a Recruitment Brand than all the initiatives that internal HR is likely to have taken in Google China over the past few years.

A conspiracy theory approach would suggest that maybe HR was behind the email but there’s no proof …

These pictures above presented Google as an Employer of Choice, and they raised the bar for every other company in China. Suddenly hiring got a little bit more difficult. The pictures became the new definition of ‘where I deserve to work’ for many professsionals in China. You probably don’t need a Candidate Value Proposition when you’ve got this environment.

But now I see there is a new viral email, of the Google offices in Zurich, Switzerland. The bar just moved higher.

Much higher.

It used to be that if you thought of the word BIG, the United States came to mind. Texas ranches, skyscrapers, biggest doughnuts, largest ball of string etc.  But more and more it is China that acts a substitue for LARGE.

Now it extends to phones, and not the volume of mobile or landlines.  A guy known as Mr, Tan, who lives in Songyuan city, has just built an exact copy of his own mobile. He hopes to have it entered in to something like the Guinness Book of Records. (His final goal is not specfically cited.)

Apparently a journalist from his home town tested the phone, and was able to confirm that it actually works.  

The only thing missing is a vibrate function.

In Part I we saw that headhunters operate in a very different world from internal recruiters and HR professionals. They take a long term approach, and they give to receive, without an expectation of immediate reciprocation.

But what specific actions do they take, and how are these different from the actions HR normally take?.
 

Building a Relationship

Firstly, they put the candidate at ease. This is partly because they are not the final decision maker, so the pressure is lowered. But it is also a deliberate choice on their part. They have psychological tools at their disposal, like mirroring, behavioural interviewing and basic empathy, and they take full advantage of them.

HR professionals seem to take the opposite approach. They work from a list of desired skills and traits, and because a lot of HR staff do not have a technical background, they assume their job is to find out what is wrong with the presented candidate. Once they have found the flaw, their job is done. 

So HR can be seen as a gatekeeper function that ensures that line managers see people who fit the criteria set out in the Job Description. They screen out with enthusiasm because it shows that they are productive. 

Headhunters screen in, and they are typically seen by candidates as the access route into a company. So the personal alignment is better. They will take a risk of meeting a less-than-perfect candidate on the basis that if she is not suitable for the current position, she might offer a solution to another position. Either now or later. Candidates can see that the headhunter is solving a problem, and if they can build a relationship with her, maybe that solution could be the key to their next career.

So generally candidates find headhunters much more approachable at interview. They attempt to understand their thinking and motivation so that they can be sure of a good match with their client. They draw as much out of candidates as they can, and their attitude is that they are there to facilitate the hiring process.
  
  
Sell, Sell, Sell

Headhunters are always selling. Famously, they don’t have lunch alone. This is because they see lunch as another opportunity to sell themselve to potential clients, who might be dining in the same restaurant. HR staff generally do eat alone, and normally in the company canteen.

The headhunters don’t just sell themselves. Typically they present their job as an opportunity rather than a list of bullet points in a Job Description. The good ones pitch the position at the right level and identify the fit with the candidate. Admittedly, the weak ones oversell but the pitch is hard to get absolutely right.

Rarely do headhunters undersell, which this is exactly what HR often does. Internal company staffers, of all kinds, don’t seem to get it that professionals outside their company don’t know all the ins and outs of their about company. They don’t know the lingo and they don’t know the insider jokes.

There is a general assumption still floating around that a company has something to offer a candidate, and not the other way around. The fact that virtually all job candidates need to be sold on a position, especially when there is such a War for Talent, is lost in this approach.

Overcoming objections is also a key trait of headhunters, a trick they learned from sales. They make sure to identify the true objection behind all the false objections that the candidate will offer for not moving forward. They test the candidate reaction as often as possible and don’t get caught out so often when the candidate stops the process.   
 

Follow the Crowd

To some extent headhunters are a little like psychologists. HR tends to operate like quality inspectors, mentally checking off the different items, or deviations, as they go along. (Yes, I know, I’m being a little unfair. But there’s a lot of this thinking about.)

One of the psychological tools that headhunters use is the concept of Social Proof. This is the ‘follow the crowd’ phenomenon where people will look to others to find cues as to what to do. In ambiguous situations, like the hiring process, this can have a strong effect.

Social proof is used by headhunters to maintain momentum in the hiring. As part of their generally positive tone, headhunters will be sure to take the opportunity to inform the candidate that they have “placed many people” with this particular client, or that particular hiring manager.

This creates a forward momentum that may help bring someone on board. The logic is that if many other people have signed up to this opportunity, or company, then it must be good. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

Having a underlying knowledge of social proof also helps to explain why headhunters look upon professionals who are out of a job as an opportunity, not a problem. They do their background checks but once these are passed the headhunter will normally be very positive about the candidate. HR tends to be suspicious that the person has not been able to get a job, and that any subsequent failure will be attributed to HR.

All the headhunter can see is a very motivated individual, with the right background and skills, and no notice period. 

Headhunters are often thought to be the kind of people who can go out and acquire excellent job candidates for their clients, just at the drop of a hat. We all know it’s not that easy but it is the common perception of people outside the human resource field.

Behind these apparently effortless hiring results are literally years of developing and maintaining relationships with successful professionals. A determination to succeed is a pre-requisite for ongoing recruiting success and true headhunters do not work in the business for a few years and move on.

Most HR people will never work in the headhunting field but there is advantage to be found in looking at the basic skills and techniques that headhunters use, and how internal HR can take advantage of them and apply them in their own work.
    

It’s All Relationships

The key issue with true headhunters, as opposed to those who just put the title on the bottom right of their business card, is that their relationships with prospective candidates are long-term. Headhunters don’t mine databases for skills, and they have to keep momentum in their candidate relationship over long periods of time. This has to be done without going into any deep relationships until a suitable position has come up.

For this reason true headhunters are likely to be in a relationship with many potential candidates, even when they have no position to offer. This is the part that many recruiters never master.

The reasons for this are quite varied. Internal recruiters are often targeting a job as Human Resources Manager and don’t stay long enough in recruiting to develop any real depth in their relationships. The are often introverts and prefer deep relationships with a small number of people, to what they would she as the shallowness of multiple ‘friends’.

Turnover of recruiters is also high and a network of telecommunications people is quickly lost when the recruiter moves into industrial parts. In a War for Talent market like China there is a strong requirement to put ‘bums on seats’ and this precludes a long-term relationship approach.

To my mind only a few people and a few companies in the world have actually achieved a sufficient number of candidate relationships that qualifies them to call themselves Headhunters. They know who they are. Funnily enough, most of them prefer the word Search Consultants, as the expression Headhunter can have negative connotations.
  
   
Give To Receive

A cynical view of all this would lead us to believe that headhunters maintain false, shallow relationships that are based on purely selfish motivations. 

But reciprocation is one of the tools that I believe is essential to their success. Giving something away is good business because in most cases you can rely on the other person to give back when you need them to. People don’t like to have too much debit on the relationship balance sheet. It’s makes them feel uncomfortable, and that feeling can only be alleviated when the favour is returned.

I’m not a big fan of the ‘Guanxi’ network where you calculate the value of what you are owed, and expect it to be given it’s equivalent in return. These are shallow relationships that just happens to take a long time to work themselves out. True giving is done without the expectation of anything in return.

A good example is social networking, where the ethos is that members are required to give before they receive. Headhunters often have large connections bases on social networking sites and they are an obvious person to choose if you want to connect with someone else. Their inbox will be filled with requests to connect two individuals together.

Their natual tendency might be to refuse these connection requests, but if they think long-term they will oblige, even if it means the loss of a potential search fee. In the long run the obligations they build will be returned in the form of a basic trust, and this trust will eventually result in business relationships that will last a long time. Admittedly, it’s a long chain of causal connections but results will accrue to those who commit to their career, and who tough it out in the beginning.

This is a much different world from that of the internal company recruiter who spends his day as a PC-jockey, searching for skills in a well-thumbed job portal.   

From a hiring perspective you could just as easily be watching the rise of salaries in China, but if you want a visual illustration as to why the War for Talent in China is so difficult to win, this video comparison of exports in Asia over the past 14 years is just the ticket.

You can actually see China rising up like a Goliath, and dwarfing the other countries in the region.

This export increase is mirrored by the rise in China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which has been kept above 8-9% for about 20 years. Not too shabby, eh?

Inevitably there has been a lag in skills development, and as a consequence China’s salaries are rising at about 16% per year on average. This is coming off an internal company awarded rise of about 9-10%, and a job change rise that ranges from 20% to 30%. For in-demand positions this can reach 100%.

(Note that the average city professional changes job every 18 months, according to Hewitt.)

City Salaries

The average annual salary for both professional and non-professional staff in China’s cities is now about RMB 25,000 and at current rates equals roughly US$3,500. (By the time you read this it may be worth more dollars). According the National Bureau of Statistics this is an increase of 18 percent over 2006. It is also the biggest rise in six years.

Previous increases amount to ‘only’ 14% per annum, and at a compound rate of interest this means that in slightly less than six years the average salary in China’s cities doubled. Tell that to your average European and he is likely to suffer a little Shock and Awe. Shock that salaries could be increasing so highly somewhere else in the world, and Awe at the size of increases and the rate at which China is catching up on the 1st World. But this would be tempered by a small degree of hope because each percentage salary increase lowers the possibility of further outsourcing of European jobs to China.

If the current rate of increase were to continue, salaries in Chinese cities would double in less than five years. Luckily, this is not a likely scenario, and the dark clouds of the world’s economic troubles lead to a silver lining of lessening salary pressures in China. Please don’t ask me to enumerate ‘lessening’.

The details from the NBS provides a little more insight into regional variations. The highest salary is to be found in Beijing which might come as a surprise to newly arrived foreigners, or business visitors, who see much higher levels of development in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. 

These three locations would appear to have the strongest need for staff, and by implication be willing to pay the highest salaries. But these three cities are much more attractive and open than Beijing, so they end up with lower average salaries.

Information Lack

The NBS also note that the average salary in China shows a wide distribution of values, not just between cities but also between industries. They cite a lack of market forces but I would approach this from the point of view of information.

Put simply, there is not enough information around to help candidates and employers make rational hiring decisions. Candidates don’t know how much to ask for, and companies are desperate to hire so they can be very flexible on salaries for the right person.

Meanwhile, for non-critical positions, companies must maintain internal pay equity so they are very motivated to keep salaries in these positions as low as possible. This results in somewhat schizophrenic hiring, and widely diverging salaries; even for the same job. 

The fact that companies do not set pay ranges for jobs also leads to a more dynamic salary negotiation between potential employees and HR departments. The agreed salary figure is more closely linked to candidate/HR negotiation skills than is it to the requirements and key performance indicators in the Job Description. Those who push for more often get it.

Openness and transparency. It’s the only way forward.