Only 11 of 598 job postings we track name a salary

The gap between skills and salary

Across the 598 active postings we track, imported directly from the career pages of 20 Canadian employers, only 11 state a salary range at all. That means 587 postings — the overwhelming majority — say nothing about pay. Compare that to skills: all 598 postings carry skills and categories derived from their text. Employers describe what they want in granular detail, but almost none say what they'll pay for it.

This is not a small oversight. It is the default. A candidate scanning our catalogue can tell, with precision, that 138 postings require Python, that 115 require Sales Enablement, or that 104 call for Outbound Prospecting. They cannot tell, in 587 out of 598 cases, what the job pays.

What a posting looks like when it names skills but not salary

The typical posting in our catalogue is dense with requirement language and silent on compensation. Take the largest category, Sales, with 159 live postings — a posting there is likely to mention Sales Enablement, Outbound Prospecting, Account Management, or Negotiation, all of which rank among the top skills across the catalogue. Engineering, the second-largest category at 143 postings, leans on Python, Distributed Systems, SQL, and AWS. Data & AI, with 116 postings, draws heavily on Machine Learning, Data Analysis, and Large Language Models — the latter appearing in 73 postings, a sign of how quickly this skill has become standard rather than exotic.

What these postings share is specificity about the work and vagueness about the reward. A posting might list five or six named skills, tie itself to one of 37 distinct categories, and still leave the compensation line blank.

Who is hiring, and how they describe it

The employers most active in our catalogue right now are Neo Financial (94 open postings), Cohere (93), Tenstorrent (53), Instacart (51), and Wealthsimple (39). Together these five account for a large share of the 598 postings we track. None of this changes the salary picture: transparency on pay is rare regardless of company size or sector. A fintech posting from Neo Financial and a chip-design posting from Tenstorrent are equally likely to skip the salary line while still tagging specific skills like Signal Integrity (16 postings) or AML & KYC (14 postings).

Why this matters for employers writing postings

For an employer deciding how to write a posting, the catalogue offers a clear picture of the norm: skill and category tagging is universal, salary disclosure is exceptional. If your posting names skills — and 598 out of 598 postings we track do — you are doing what every other employer already does. If it also states a salary, you are doing something only 11 postings in the entire catalogue do.

That scarcity cuts both ways. A posting with a salary range stands out simply because so few do. Given the categories most saturated with postings — Sales at 159, Engineering at 143, Data & AI at 116 — a candidate comparing multiple similar postings in these fields has plenty of skill detail to sort through, but almost no pay signal to compare against. An employer willing to state a number is competing in a nearly empty field of 11 against 587 that offer none.

The takeaway

The catalogue shows a clear pattern for anyone writing a job posting for the Canadian market we track: naming skills is the norm — all 598 postings do it — and naming a salary is the exception, done by only 11. Whatever the reasons employers have for omitting pay, the numbers describe a catalogue where the description of the work is detailed and the description of the reward is almost always absent.