As Smart explained, it first off started as a trial before it was rolled out across the company. He continued: “The frustration over the years has been that, as a business, Sky Betting & Gaming was a competitive-paying employer, but we never had the confidence to advertise the salaries and there were lots of internal reasons why we couldn’t do it. But then as recruiters, it made this job so much harder for us. We had the reputation of being a good [paying employer] but people didn’t know that from just going on the careers site. So, I wanted to get to the point that, if you went onto the careers site, straight away, you could see what that salary banding was so you can opt in or opt out [of applying for the job] at the start.”

Smart said that, often, candidates will put a lot of time and effort into completing a job application. And he’s right – 2016 polling from Cranberry Panda found that 38% of people spend up to 30 minutes on a job application.

Positive results

So, rather than wait until the interview stage and find out the candidate and company aren’t on the same page with regards to salary, jobseekers can decide whether the salary suits them ahead of applying.

Smart added: “I’d rather have a great conversation [where] we can afford to take it further rather than [find out] we don’t meet your expectations....” With the above data from Hays suggesting that some candidates wouldn’t apply to a role without an indication of salary, it’s unsurprising that Sky Betting & Gaming has witnessed some positive results since being more transparent. In fact, the gambling company has seen a 30% increase in users visiting the careers site since they began including salaries on job adverts. Internal talent also appear to have praised the move too. “Since we’ve done this, I’ve had a number of people who have come up to me internally and have said ‘I’m really proud that we are actually doing that’,” he added.

What Sky Betting & Gaming hopes to achieve

While the initiative is still in its early days, it’s promising to see a good reaction from both external and internal talent. But, from an organisational standpoint, what does the gambling firm strive to achieve by doing this? When asked this very question by myGrapevine magazine, Smart replied: “It’s more the transparency and openness for me. I always wanted to be transparent because recruitment gets harder and harder each year, so I want to try and make it easier for us as a business but also, internally, people want that transparency.”

Additionally, Smart’s other aim with this is to improve the candidate experience. “All career sites take a long time to apply for so I don’t want people to waste their time,” he explained. Having a positive candidate experience can make a jobseeker 38% more likely to accept a job, according to statistics published in IBM’s 'The far-reaching impact of candidate experience' whitepaper, meaning that this could bring about huge benefits for the organisation.

The company’s move to publish salary bandings with job adverts is a good example of how Sky Betting & Gaming has strived to become more transparent in hiring, both for internal and external talent. When asked why he thinks transparency is so key in the hiring process, Smart responded: “It lines up with our values as a business as well. Flutter’s ‘Work Better’ strategy, which is a core pillar of our global sustainability strategy, our Positive Impact Plan, is about developing policies that foster a diverse and inclusive workplace and empower people to perform at their best – we believe core to this is having a transparent and more inclusive hiring process. Transparency is interweaved into a lot of the things that we do at Sky Betting & Gaming,” Smart concluded.