Devs are inspecting Greenhouse payloads to find hidden salary caps
Next time a job portal asks for your "desired salary," just open your DevTools and you might find the answer sitting right in the payload. Recently, developers have been peeping into application forms. The JSON they hide says far more than the recruiter ever will. 🕵️ The field that pretends to ask Here's how it goes. You complete an application on a platform such as Greenhouse. There is a box…
Developers are investigating hidden salary caps in job application forms, particularly those created by the Greenhouse platform. When filling out an application, job seekers typically encounter a box asking about their salary expectations. However, some platforms secretly include a maximum threshold in the form's JSON payload, which is displayed in the browser's developer tools.
Candidates who list a salary above this hidden limit may be automatically filtered out without any notification. This practice undermines the goal of pay transparency and can be attributed to poorly written client-side code that inadvertently reveals the company's budget to job applicants. Once companies become aware of these leaks, they often make efforts to patch them, indicating their awareness of the bias this practice perpetuates.
Job seekers should be aware of this tactic and use browser developer tools to inspect forms for hidden information, as not all companies handle this information elegantly and securely on the server-side.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
