Your client does not want salary in the job ad, and meanwhile you get to explain why the campaign is underperforming. You probably have that conversation every month, and the person without numbers usually loses it. Below: which objections to listing salary hold up and which do not, how to show a range without exposing your margin or your client's pay structure, and how to measure it yourself within two weeks.
Why agencies leave salary out
Ask ten agencies why the salary field stays empty and you get four answers back. They are not equally strong.
- The client forbade it, or it was never discussed.
- Rate minus salary is your margin, and you do not want to publish that.
- Competing agencies will see what your client pays and outbid it by a few euros.
- The client's pay structure grew unevenly and a published range raises questions among existing staff.
The client does not want it
This is usually not a position but a conversation that never happened. Do not ask whether you may name the salary, because that is a yes-or-no question and the answer is usually no. Ask whether you may name a range starting at the bottom of the scale they already use. Frame it as a campaign decision with a consequence: without salary you pay more per usable candidate, and that difference ends up on his invoice.
Your margin becomes visible
This is the real objection, and it is only half right. The client already knows your rate; he has nothing to calculate. The candidate does not know your rate and will not go looking for it. Anyone who genuinely wants to know what you earn on a placement calls your client or requests a quote. The risk sits mainly with secondment and with permanent placements at a published rate. In temp work the user-company pay rules are already fixed by the client's collective agreement, so you are publishing a figure that was set anyway.
Competitors are watching
They are watching regardless. Your Meta ads sit in the ad library, your job pages are indexed, and your recruiters knock on the same doors. Salary is rarely the piece of information the competition is missing. If your lead rests on nobody knowing what the role pays, that is not a lead, it is a delay.
What a visible range does to your flow
Two things happen at once, and they pull in different directions. First: selection moves forward. Candidates for whom the figure is too low stop clicking. Candidates for whom it fits click sooner and with more intent. Whether your CTR goes up or down therefore depends on your audience and on the figure itself, not on some fixed rule.
Second: your applications get cleaner. Fewer people dropping out on pay after the intake, fewer offers declined, less recruiter time spent on conversations that were never going anywhere. You do not see that effect in your ad report, but you see it in your calendar.
Suppose you run two identical ad sets of 500 euros side by side. Without salary you get 800 clicks, 60 applications and 15 people who actually show up for an intake. With salary you get 640 clicks, 44 applications and 20 people at intake. Your cost per application rises from 8.33 to 11.36 euros. Your cost per intake falls from 33.33 to 25 euros. Note: these are invented figures to show the calculation, not industry data.
That is exactly why cost per application is a dangerous KPI to steer on alone: the variant that looks more expensive on paper can be the cheapest one as soon as you work through your cost per candidate end to end instead of stopping at the application.
Showing a range without exposing your margin
Choose your band width deliberately
A band from 2,800 to 4,200 euros is not information, it is a shrug. Candidates read only the bottom number and assume the top is meant for somebody else. A rule of thumb that works in practice: keep the top no more than roughly a quarter above the bottom, and tie the band to something measurable. So not 'depending on experience', but '3,200 euros at two years of experience, 3,800 euros from five years and a valid safety certificate'.
Starting-from figures, hourly versus monthly
A starting-from figure is useful when the top genuinely varies per candidate, for instance in scarce technical roles. The downside: candidates read 'from' as 'this is what I will get'. Only use it when that bottom number is attractive on its own.
In temp work you deal in hourly rates while candidates think in monthly amounts. So name both: '18.50 to 21.00 euros gross per hour, at 38 hours roughly 3,050 to 3,450 euros gross per month'. That way someone who never converts an hourly rate still recognises himself in the figure. And state what comes on top: shift allowance, travel compensation, reserved entitlements.
Reference the scale, but never on its own
If your client falls under a collective agreement, the scale is already public and you are publishing nothing new. 'Scale 6 of the metal and engineering collective agreement' is then defensible towards your client, because it is already out there. But always put a figure next to it. Almost no candidate looks up a scale number, certainly not from a phone inside the ad.
When not to show it
- When the client does not yet know what he wants to pay. A figure you have to walk back costs you more trust than silence does.
- For senior and leadership roles where the package is assembled per person and base salary is only part of the story.
- For a confidential replacement search, where the figure plus the job title traces back to one specific person.
- When the pay is clearly below market. Showing it costs you volume, but hiding it only moves the rejection to the intake. The real fix sits in your client's offer, not in your ad copy.
How to test it instead of arguing about it
- Pick a vacancy with volume. A role that pulls dozens of applications a month, not a one-off position that gets three.
- Build two ad sets with the same creative, the same targeting and the same budget. The only difference is the salary line in the copy and on the image.
- Send both to the same job landing page and give each set its own UTM, so you know where every application came from.
- Run it for at least fourteen days. Do not judge after three: that is the algorithm's learning phase, not the effect of your salary line.
- Measure four things in this order: CTR, cost per application, the percentage of applicants who show up for an intake, and cost per intake.
- Decide on cost per intake. Use cost per application only to understand where the difference comes from.
If you stay under thirty applications per variant, any difference is noise. Run it longer, raise the budget, or test on your biggest vacancy. And test one job family at a time: what works for production staff will not necessarily do the same for a work planner.
The direction of travel: pay transparency becomes the norm
Europe is moving towards more openness about pay. The EU pay transparency directive covers, among other things, the information applicants should receive about starting pay before the interview, and a ban on asking candidates about their current salary. For the exact translation into Dutch law and the precise dates, consult your lawyer or your trade association, because that is still moving and I am not going to quote article numbers at you here.
The direction is clear enough: withholding salary becomes the exception rather than the habit. For you that is more opportunity than burden. Agencies already working with ranges will have their job copy, their client agreements and their ATS fields in order while everyone else is still figuring out what exactly is required.
Conclusion
Of the four reasons to leave salary out, really only one holds: the moment your client does not yet know what he pays. The rest is habit. Show a narrow band tied to something measurable, name the hourly rate and the monthly amount side by side, and judge the result on cost per intake instead of cost per application.
Do not want to set that test up yourself, or stuck in the conversation with your clients? See how we run campaigns for staffing and secondment agencies and where salary transparency fits into that.
