The vast majority of people are nervous before job interviews and it is not always easy in a pressured context to tell and highlight their best qualities. Questions like “Why should we hire you?” and “What role do you have in a group?” don’t always have completely obvious answers.
One question that does, however, is “What do you earn today?”.
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EU: This question will be banned in job interviews
The question is not always the most fun to ask as it may determine what your future salary will be. However, it will be banned, following a new directive from the EU. Dagens Nyheter was the first to report on this.
The reason is that the EU wants to reduce the wage gap between men and women. Today, women in the EU earn on average 13 percent less than men, and as a result men also receive more in pension. In 2018, the gap between women’s and men’s pension was 30 percent.
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The issue that will be banned June 2026
The directive is called the EU’s salary transparency directive and must be implemented in all EU countries by June 2026. That the question “What do you earn today?” disappearing from job interviews, however, is far from the only thing that will change.
Employers will need to inform jobseekers of the starting salary or salary scale for the vacant position even before the person is hired, either in the advertisement or just before the job interview. In this way, the risk of wage discrimination is reduced, the EU believes.
– You should know the salary range even before you negotiate so that you don’t end up in a worse position. In practice, employers will have to adapt in several ways at the beginning of the recruitment process, says Erik Adell HellströmChancellery Council at the Ministry of Labor Markets, to DN.
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Employers may be obliged to pay compensatory wages
It will also be prohibited for employers not to allow their workers to talk about each other’s wages. Today, employers can do this through, for example, non-disclosure agreements.
Companies with more than 100 employees will be required to annually report the pay gap between women and men in their organization to the relevant authority, which in Sweden may become the Discrimination Ombudsman.
If the difference cannot be justified with, for example, a difference in tasks or working hours, employers will be obliged to compensate the person who has been discriminated against.
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With the directive, the EU wants to shed light on wage discrimination, which is often unintentional, and increase employees’ awareness of workplace pay for women as well as men.
The Swedish Ministry of Labor and Employment is currently waiting for a referral from a government investigation to then adapt the EU directive for Swedish law.
See the full directive on it The website of the European Council and the Council of the European Union.