Advice and guides / For candidates
Expected salary: what to write when you do not want to name a number
Everybody has been told not to name a number first. On an application form, that advice costs you interviews.
The advice about never naming a number comes from negotiation, and in a negotiation it is often right. An application form is not a negotiation. It is a sorting step, and a blank or evasive answer gets you sorted into the pile nobody has time to call.
What the number is actually used for
Not to anchor you low. At the shortlist stage it is used to check whether you and the role are in the same range at all. Every mandate has a band the employer has already approved. If the band is 6 to 9 and you want 18, nobody is doing you a favour by sending you forward, and if the band is 6 to 9 and you wrote 6.5, you have just made yourself easy to place.
Recruiters filter on this field. That is the whole reason it exists on the form.
Four answers that work
- A range, with your current number attached. "Currently on 5.4, looking at 7 to 8." This is the strongest answer because it is checkable and it shows what you think you are worth.
- A number with a condition. "8 LPA for an onsite role in Mumbai, lower for something remote." Honest, and it tells the recruiter which mandates to put you against.
- A floor. "Not below 6.5." Useful if you genuinely do not care about the ceiling.
- A range with a reason. "7 to 9, because that is what the last two offers in this role were." A reason makes the number feel researched rather than hopeful.
What does not work
- Blank. The form still gets submitted, and you are the only candidate on the list the recruiter cannot place against a band.
- "Negotiable" on its own. It reads as no number at all. If you mean flexible, write a range and then say flexible.
- "As per company standards." Every recruiter has read this sentence ten thousand times and it tells them nothing.
- A number far above the market for your experience. It does not start a negotiation, it ends the shortlist.
Work out your range before you type
Look at what the role pays at your experience level, not at your dream level. We publish indicative ranges for seventy five roles, broken into brackets from fresher up to ten years, so you can see roughly where a role sits before you write a figure. Those are market ranges, not offers, and the actual number always depends on the employer and the city.
If you are a fresher
You have less to anchor to, so anchor to the role rather than to yourself. Find what the role pays at entry level in your city, write that range, and say it is your first job. Freshers who write a confident realistic range get taken more seriously than freshers who write nothing, and far more seriously than ones who write a number three brackets above their experience.
If you genuinely have no idea, write the range and add one line: "first job, open to guidance on the band". That is honest, it is not weak, and it gives the recruiter something to work with.
One more thing
Write your expected figure the way you think about it. Per year, per month, in lakhs, in thousands. A good form accepts all of it. Ours does, because people write "8 LPA", "45k a month" and "negotiable, around 7" and all three are useful. What is not useful is nothing at all.
When you have a number, the application takes about two minutes, and the assessment after it takes thirty.