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Hiring Issue — Compensation Intelligence
Running interviews to find out what candidates expect — and what competitors are paying them — is a documented practice. A LiveCareer survey of 918 HR professionals found that 26% explicitly cite “gaining insight into the job market and competitors” as a reason for posting roles they have no immediate intent to fill. Your salary expectations are the data. The interview is the collection mechanism.
This is a specific variant of the ghost job problem. The role may be real and may eventually be filled. But in a salary fishing process, the primary near-term value is compensation intelligence: understanding what market rates look like at various levels and functions, calibrating internal pay bands, or identifying what rivals are offering candidates in the hiring pool.
Recognising it protects your time. It also protects information you may be legally or contractually required not to disclose — including your current employer's pay structure.
The standard way to benchmark compensation is to purchase a salary survey from a data provider — WorldatWork, Mercer, Radford, or a sector-specific equivalent. These surveys are expensive. A comprehensive compensation dataset for a mid-size company can cost thousands of pounds or dollars annually, and the data reflects a population, not the specific competitors a company is trying to benchmark against.
Interviewing candidates is free. It produces real-time, specific data: what candidates at a defined level and function are expecting, what competing offers look like right now, which companies are paying above market, and where the floor is. A company that interviews twenty candidates over three months has a richer, more current compensation picture than most paid surveys offer — at zero cost to the data collector.
The cost is entirely borne by the candidates. Each person who prepares, interviews, and discloses their compensation data has spent hours producing intelligence for a company that may never have intended to hire them.
Individual signals can have innocent explanations. In combination, they indicate a process where compensation data — not candidate evaluation — is the primary output.
In a genuine process, compensation is addressed once budget alignment is confirmed — typically in a first recruiter screen, then not revisited until offer stage. When a process returns repeatedly to what you currently earn, what you expect, and what you have been offered elsewhere, the interview is functioning as a compensation survey. The role evaluation is thin; the pay discussion is extensive.
A characteristic pattern: rapid initial response, enthusiastic scheduling, a strong first impression from the recruiter — followed by silence shortly after you disclose salary expectations or a competing offer amount. The information was obtained. There was no further use for you in the process. The role may still be open; the next candidate is already being screened.
Being asked whether you have other offers in flight is standard. Being asked what those offers are — total compensation breakdown, base versus bonus, equity vesting schedule, benefits package — is not evaluation. It is competitive intelligence gathering. Companies use this data to understand what peers and rivals are paying at equivalent levels, without paying for a market data survey.
A role that remains open for six months or more, cycling through candidates without producing a hire, is a signal that either the bar is unreachable or the role is not a genuine vacancy. When combined with heavy salary-focused screening, the longevity of the posting suggests it is functioning as a standing data collection exercise rather than an active search. New applicants provide fresh market rate data at regular intervals.
Compensation benchmarking tends to spike at moments when companies need to set new pay bands — after a funding round, during a headcount expansion, before a restructure, or when trying to retain staff during a competitor hiring surge. Posting roles at these moments to gather external salary data is a low-cost alternative to paying for a compensation survey. Candidates in these processes are often genuine leads who never progress because no hire was ever the immediate goal.
Questions about your current total compensation, your team's pay bands, or how your company structures bonuses are not candidate evaluation questions. They are competitive intelligence questions. Answering them provides the interviewing company with data points on a rival's pay structure that they could not obtain through any public channel. You are not obliged to answer, and in most cases you are bound by confidentiality obligations to your employer not to.
Salary fishing tends to operate in two modes. The first is internal calibration: a company is setting or resetting its own pay bands — after a funding round, a restructure, a merger, or a period of pay compression — and uses candidate interviews to understand where the market is. The candidates are real leads; the process is real in the sense that a hire may eventually occur. But the timing and the outcome are shaped by a data gathering agenda the candidate is not told about.
The second is competitor intelligence: a company is specifically trying to understand what rivals are paying, which companies are offering equity, and what the talent pipeline looks like. Candidates from specific companies — often named in the job description requirements or targeted via LinkedIn sourcing — are invited to interview and questioned about their total compensation, their team structures, and their reasons for considering a move. The information gathered maps the competitive landscape. The hire, if it happens, is incidental.
Senior and specialist candidates are the most exposed to the second variant. A candidate with eight years of experience in a defined specialism is carrying specific market intelligence about their employer's pay, structure, and retention challenges. That information has value that the hire itself may not.
Salary fishing exists at the intersection of documented ghost job practices and evolving pay transparency legislation.
A LiveCareer survey of 918 HR professionals conducted in March 2025 found that 45% regularly post ghost jobs and 48% do so occasionally — 93% in total. When asked why, 26% cited "gaining insight into the job market and competitors." This is the most cited data point confirming that salary and market intelligence extraction is an explicit stated reason for posting roles with no hiring intent.
LiveCareer, March 2025
An Enhancv survey of job seekers in 2026 found that among senior-level respondents, 31% reported being asked for "consultative advice," "strategy decks," or "market intelligence" during interviews they later identified as ghost jobs. Candidates with 8 or more years of experience are the most frequently targeted, with 51% encountering ghost job processes.
Enhancv, 2026
As of 2025, twenty-two US states and twenty-three municipalities have enacted salary history bans — prohibiting employers from asking candidates about their current or previous compensation. States include California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and others. Asking for salary history in these jurisdictions is unlawful regardless of the employer's stated reason.
HR Dive — salary history ban tracker
California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Rhode Island, and Washington require employers to disclose salary ranges in job postings. Pay transparency requirements change the dynamic — candidates can verify whether the disclosed range is consistent with what the recruiter is actually targeting, making salary fishing processes easier to identify.
Rippling — pay transparency laws by state
If you are in a jurisdiction with a salary history ban — which now covers 22 US states including California, New York, and Illinois — you are legally entitled to decline questions about your current or previous compensation. You can say directly: “I understand salary history questions are restricted in this state — I would prefer to discuss the range for this role.” A legitimate recruiter will respect this. A salary fishing process will often stall.
Even outside regulated jurisdictions, you are not obligated to disclose current compensation. A useful counter is to ask the recruiter for the approved budget or salary band before sharing expectations. This is reasonable, increasingly expected in markets with pay transparency laws, and immediately clarifying: a genuine process will answer it; a fishing process will deflect.
On competitor intelligence questions — about your employer's pay structure, team composition, or internal processes — you are likely bound by a confidentiality agreement that prohibits disclosure regardless of context. Treating these as out of scope in an interview is legally and professionally sound, and a legitimate employer will not press you on it.
If a process follows the pattern described here — heavy compensation focus, stall after disclosure, no feedback — it is worth documenting. Reports on Ghost Jobs Index that describe salary fishing processes help other candidates recognise the pattern and enter similar conversations with more leverage.
26% of HR professionals openly admit posting ghost jobs for competitive intelligence. Most candidates have no idea this is happening to them. Sharing this changes that.
Report it anonymously. Noting the company, the role level, and the pattern of questioning builds a public record that other candidates can use to make informed decisions before they enter the same process.