"Please Send Us Your Last Payslip, So We Know How Little to Offer You"

Hiring managers say it's about budget. It's really about your last job’s salary. Here’s how salary anchoring still rigs the offer process.

The opening act begins with that timeless line: “What’s your current salary?” It’s delivered with such casual curiosity that you might forget it’s a trap. Candidates smile, recruiters nod, and a small piece of dignity quietly exits stage left.

Employers posture as champions of merit, promising fair evaluation, while secretly checking your market worth against the ghost of your last paycheck. The polite fiction is that this helps with “budget alignment,” though the real motive is more pedestrian: saving money while maintaining moral cover. It’s the HR equivalent of saying, “It’s not personal, it’s policy.”

Governments have tried to end the show. They’ve sent in the lawyers, the directives, the compliance slides. Maybe companies truly don’t know better, or maybe their software doesn’t allow for ethical behavior. But deep down, they know anchoring pay to history is thrift disguised as sophistication. And still, the show goes on.

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“It’s Not Suppression, It’s Policy!”

The most sacred number in modern compensation theatre is the 10 to 15 percent uplift. An arbitrary figure passed down through generations of hiring managers as if carved into stone tablets. No one knows where it came from, but everyone invokes it with the certainty of divine law.

There is no regulation that mandates it. No audit trail. No comp authority who officially endorsed it. And yet, you’ll hear it recited in recruitment calls across time zones, in HR meetings, and typed with confidence into emails that begin with “after careful consideration.” It is the numerical equivalent of “just how things are done.”

This rule is not about fairness or fiscal discipline. It’s not even about merit or market alignment. It is about leveraging your last pay cheque as a convenient ceiling. The logic is simple: if we anchor our offer to what you used to make, we can ensure you remain slightly less underpaid than before, while appearing generous.

The 10–15 percent rule is designed to value your willingness to accept a slightly improved version of your past misfortune. It turns historical inequality into a forecast.

And the alternatives? Endless. There are

• Benchmark platforms,

• Compensation studies,

• Internal job leveling frameworks,

• Regional salary reports.

But those require intention and effort. They also remove the wiggle room companies like to keep for when they really want someone.

So instead, we return to the laminated line: “We can offer you 10 to 15 percent more.” Not because it makes sense. But because it’s just enough to sound reasonable, and just vague enough to be unchallengeable.

The Illusion of Voluntariness

Welcome to the land of “voluntary disclosure,” the awkward grey zone of recruitment theatre. In theory, it means the candidate offered up their salary history unprovoked. In reality, it’s more often the result of nudging with deniability.

A recruiter leans in and asks, “Just for context, what were you earning before?” It’s said in such a casual tone that if you don’t answer, you risk looking like you’ve misunderstood the social contract of small talk. And once it’s out there, it becomes fair game.

• Never mind that the request was implied.

• Never mind that the law in many places technically prohibits the question.

Now that the number has “entered the chat,” it can be used to shape the offer, justify a lower figure, and tie a bow on the whole thing with a claim of neutrality.

The fiction is that you volunteered it. The reality is that you knew refusing might brand you as difficult, uncooperative, or high-maintenance before day one. Recruiters don’t need to force it. They just need to suggest it, and let the candidate do the rest.

Even in regulated environments like New York City or (soon to be) EU, companies have gotten quite good at staying legally adjacent. They don’t ask, they just create the conditions for you to answer. And once you do, your “voluntary” confession becomes the basis of your involuntary ceiling. It’s tidy, untraceable, and entirely by design.

The Fantasy of Enforcement

Even in jurisdictions where asking for your salary history is illegal, the chances of meaningful enforcement are slim to none. Sure, there are rules. Progressive rules with impressive names. But enforcement? That’s another story.

Imagine you’re deep into interviews. All feels good. Then out of nowhere, the recruiter casually drops:

“We’ll just need your last payslip for HR.”

Your internal alarm goes off. You clear your throat. “Isn’t that… not allowed?”

Cue the smile turning diplomatic.

“It’s just for internal calibration. Nothing formal.”

You hesitate. They nod. You hesitate longer. That’s it. You’re now officially “the difficult one.” Within days, a polite rejection email arrives, informing you that they’re moving forward with another candidate who presumably had no moral compass, but did have a payslip.

You now face the classic false choice:

• Lodge a complaint, submit documentation, and hope someone at the labor ministry finds the time to process your grievance in the next fiscal year.

• Or swallow the violation, send the slip, and keep the conversation alive, because you need a job, not a war.

Everyone knows how this ends. You won’t be offered the job. You probably won’t report it either. Not because you approve, but because the cost of making a stand is wildly disproportionate to the result. Nobody wants to be the candidate remembered for filing a complaint. Especially not in an industry where people talk, and “culture fit” mysteriously excludes anyone who insists on legal boundaries.

The law may be on your side, but in practice, it feels like a technicality. A box companies know how to tick, then quietly ignore.

The Infamous Role-Pricing Delusion

This is where the logic fully collapses. Salary-history anchoring is not only lazy and unfair, it’s also an objectively bad way to price a job. From a business standpoint, it makes about as much sense as pricing a product based on what someone paid for something else ten years ago.

Companies already sit on mountains of compensation data. They have:

• Job levels,

• Market bands,

• Benchmarking reports from reputable firms,

• Internal parity metrics,

• Candidate profiles stacked to the ceiling.

They know the range. They know what the role is worth. And yet, they still lean on what the candidate used to earn as the starting point. As if your previous salary, set by an entirely different company, market, or currency, should somehow dictate your future.

This would never fly anywhere else. Imagine showing up at a property listing and having the agent ask what your last rent was, before adjusting the price of the apartment accordingly. You’d walk out. Yet in hiring, this behaviour is considered standard.

And when companies really want a candidate? Suddenly the band stretches. The budget expands. Exceptions are made. Which proves what many of us already know: the so-called policy is only a policy until someone important comes along.

Salary history anchoring punishes people for changing industries, taking parental leave, moving countries, or recovering from exploitation. It reinforces the wage gaps it claims to avoid. It keeps people in financial handcuffs long after they’ve outgrown the key.

So yes, let’s call it what it is. Not “policy.” Not “best practice.” Just a well-worn tactic to keep salaries low and justification high.

So, where does that leave us? Somewhere between progress and pantomime.

On paper, the tide is turning. The EU’s Pay Transparency Directive explicitly bans salary-history questions. A growing list of U.S. states and cities have outlawed both asking about and relying on past pay. Countries like Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia have beefed up data-protection laws that make casually requesting a payslip feel a lot like stepping on a compliance landmine. Even large employers in Southeast Asia are slowly shifting toward role-based compensation, mostly because it reduces legal risk and slightly increases dignity.

And yet, the old habits hang on. The cultural muscle memory of anchoring offers to someone’s past earnings still lingers, especially in places where “voluntary disclosure” conveniently fills the gap left by now-illegal questions. Employers still cloak the ask in soft language, hoping candidates will fold before their principles do.

But this is not the future of fair hiring. If we want anything resembling a merit-based system, we need to stop calculating someone’s worth by how little someone else used to pay them.

Stop pretending it’s policy. Post the range. Price the role. And if you’re still asking for payslips in 2025, maybe it’s time you attached yours too. We’re curious.

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At StratEx - Indonesia Business Advisory we work with clients to design modern compensation models grounded in market data and pay equity. Contact us to replace legacy habits with transparent, future-fit comp policies.