Salary prep

The awkward question is easier when you've already answered it once, in writing, away from the pressure of the call. Salary Prep is where you work out what you want, and every application then measures itself against that number.

Set it up once. It takes a few minutes and it pays off on every posting after.

Two asks, not one

A salary and a freelance rate are priced differently, so Salary Prep keeps one of each, in the unit it is actually quoted in:

• Employed: a gross salary per month or per year. Paid leave, holiday pay and a pension come with it.
• Freelance: a rate per hour, per day, or a fixed fee per month (as on a B2B contract). It only pays for the time you bill, and leave, pension and costs are your own.

The same hourly number means very different things on each side. €50 an hour as an employee is a salary of about €8,700 a month; as a freelancer it leaves you far less, because nobody pays you for holidays, quiet weeks or your pension.

The page opens with the asks your Match Config looks for. If you only look for jobs, you get the salary; add a freelance rate whenever you want to compare.

Your asks also do something outside this page: Match Config can hide jobs that pay below them, from your job list, your overview and the email digest. A job paid as a salary is held to your salary ask and one paid as a rate to your freelance rate, so set the ones you would actually take. See Matching & alerts.

What each one leaves you

Each ask shows its take-home a month, worked out from a few assumptions you can change:

• Employed: holiday pay and extra months on top of twelve salaries (8% is Dutch holiday pay; a 13th month adds 8.3%), the pension your employer pays, any other benefits, and tax.
• Freelance: billable hours a year (default 1,680, not 2,080, because you will not bill every working hour), or for a monthly fee the days off it doesn't pay for; your costs and insurance; the pension you put aside; and tax.

These are flat estimates, not real tax tables. They're for comparing two offers on the same footing, not for filing anything.

Side by side

With both asks set, Salary Prep compares them on what each keeps you in a year: take-home pay plus pension, and whatever else a job pays for. The pension counts because it is pay too, just later: a freelancer who wants the same has to fund it out of the rate.

You see where each year's money goes, and both directions of the comparison:

• the freelance rate your salary is worth, the least you can charge and still come out even;
• the salary your rate is worth, the useful number when a recruiter asks for a salary expectation and you've been quoting day rates.

Then how far your rate sits above or below that break-even.

Region asks

A number that's right for one market is wrong in another. Under either ask you can add a region ask: that region gets its own amount and its own currency, replacing your main ask for jobs there rather than converting it.

Adjustments by job

Percentages that move your ask depending on what the job is: on-site or hybrid, the kind of company, part-time or an internship. The ones that match a job add up, and apply to whichever ask the job is priced in. Postings rarely say what kind of company it is, so you pick that on an application's Salary tab.

On an application

An application's Salary tab is where the preparation gets used. Record what you asked for, and if the posting states a range you'll see straight away whether your ask sits within, above or below it, converted across currencies and periods, so a yearly range in dollars and a monthly ask in euros still compare.

The ask Salary Prep works out for this specific job is offered there too, one click to use it: a salary for a permanent job, a rate for contract work, and both when the posting could be either. That's your region asks and adjustments applied to this posting's actual employment type, arrangement and location. With both asks set, the posting's own pay is shown as the other kind as well: what a contract's rate is worth as a salary, or a job's salary as a rate.

Salary never affects your match scores. Matching answers whether you fit the work. Whether the money is acceptable is a decision that stays yours, and a job you'd take for the right number should not be scored down before you've been asked.