The Power of Information: Are Companies Ready to Negotiate with Candidates Who Arrive with Real Data?
For decades, salary negotiations operated under unwritten rules: companies knew what the market paid, candidates could only guess. That asymmetry ends in June 2026.
The EU Pay Transparency Directive (EU) 2023/970 does not only change what companies must publish. It changes the position from which professionals enter a negotiation. And that has consequences for both sides of the table.
The Asymmetry That Always Existed
Until now, the process typically worked like this: a company published a job offer without a salary range, or with a range so broad it was meaningless. The candidate entered the interview without knowing whether their expectations were realistic, whether they were above market, or far below what the company had actually budgeted.
In essence, negotiation was a game where one of the players had marked cards.
This was not only a problem for candidates. It also created issues for companies: longer hiring processes due to misaligned expectations, offers rejected at the last minute, and a perception of opacity that damaged employer branding even before the first interview.
83% of candidates reject job offers that do not include a clear salary range. Opacity has a measurable cost.
What Changes with the New Law
Directive 2023/970, which becomes mandatory in June 2026, introduces three structural changes that rebalance negotiations.
Companies must publish the salary range before the first interview. Not after three interview rounds, not “to be negotiated,” not “depending on experience.” The range must be available from the first contact, ideally in the job posting itself.
Companies are prohibited from asking about a candidate’s salary history. This practice, common in many hiring processes, perpetuated pay gaps by anchoring new salaries to previous ones, regardless of whether the previous salary was fair. From 2026 onward, the conversation starts from the value of the role, not what the person earned before.
Employees will have the right to know what peers in equivalent roles earn. Any worker will be able to request information about the average salary ranges for roles of equal value within their company, broken down by gender. Internal opacity will also come to an end.
The Informed Candidate: A New Figure in the Labor Market
The combination of the new law and the growing access to salary data is creating a type of candidate that used to be rare: the professional who enters a negotiation having done their homework.
Salary benchmarking tools such as PROSFY now allow anyone to see what the market pays for their specific profile: role, level, industry, city, and specific skills. Not generic estimates, but data based on millions of real job offers.
This turns salary expectations into something grounded in evidence, not intuition or hearsay.
A candidate who enters a negotiation knowing that the market P50 for their role in Madrid is X, and that the company’s published range starts at X-15%, has real information to make decisions. They can accept, negotiate with arguments, or reject the offer with clear criteria.
What they no longer do is accept the first offer simply because they lack a reference point.
Are Companies Ready for This?
The honest answer is: many are not.
And the problem is not a lack of willingness — it is a lack of infrastructure.
Publishing a salary range is not a communication decision. It is the result of having a compensation architecture in place: roles evaluated with objective criteria, salary bands built on updated market data, and internal equity audited.
Without that groundwork, publishing a range becomes either fiction or an exposure of internal weaknesses.
Companies that reach June 2026 without doing this work will face two problems simultaneously: a legal problem, due to non-compliance with the directive, and a competitive problem, because their published ranges will not stand comparison with the data candidates already bring with them.
By contrast, companies already working with specialized recruitment and compensation consultancies — such as Servitalent in the field of strategic recruitment — are seeing that their most advanced clients arrive at hiring processes with validated salary bands. This reduces friction, shortens offer timelines, and improves the candidate experience.
Two Sides of the Same Table
Pay transparency is not a victory of employees over companies. It is a correction of a system that did not work well for either side.
For candidates, it means evaluating opportunities with real criteria: not only whether the role is interesting, but whether the compensation reflects their market value.
For companies, it means building more efficient hiring processes, with fewer drop-offs during recruitment and a more credible value proposition.
Balanced information does not eliminate negotiation. It transforms it into something more productive: a conversation between parties who understand the market, rather than a guessing game where one side always knows more than the other.
The real question is no longer whether companies will have to be transparent. It is whether they will be transparent by conviction or by obligation.
The difference is noticeable.
What Comes Next
June 2026 is a date, but the change is already underway.
The most qualified candidates — those with the most options and the ones companies most want to attract — are already entering interviews with data. The law will simply generalize this behavior across the rest of the market.
Companies that prepare now will not only avoid sanctions. They will build a real advantage in the war for talent: being perceived as honest employers in a market where transparency is becoming the standard, not the exception.