Flag a posting before it goes out without a range

Pay transparency is not one rule. It is a growing set of state, city, provincial and national rules that differ on who is covered, what has to be disclosed, whether internal postings are included and what counts as a good-faith range. A posting that is fine in one place can be a problem two states away, and the tool is only useful if it knows where you are actually publishing.

So you select the jurisdictions before you run the check, and the flags come back grouped by jurisdiction with the specific issue named. That structure matters more than a single pass or fail. Knowing that a posting is fine in three of your four target markets and short of the requirement in the fourth is an actionable result. A red cross with no location attached is not.

This is the part that catches people out. A remote role advertised by a company headquartered somewhere with no disclosure requirement can still fall under a rule because the person who applies lives somewhere that has one. Several rules are written around where the work can be performed or where the applicant is, rather than where the employer sits, and a posting that says remote, anywhere is by definition open to those places.

The checker asks explicitly whether the role is remote and, if so, which locations you are prepared to hire from. If the answer is anywhere in the country, it applies every jurisdiction in that country that has a disclosure rule, because that is the exposure you have created by writing the word anywhere. If you restrict the hiring locations in the posting, the flags narrow accordingly, which is often the simpler fix.

The practical consequence is that many employers publishing genuinely open remote roles end up disclosing a range regardless, because restricting is more work than disclosing. The checker shows you that trade-off rather than making it for you.

Every rule the checker tests against carries the date it was last reviewed, and that date is shown in the result rather than hidden in a changelog. Legislation in this area moves quickly: new laws pass, effective dates arrive, thresholds change, and guidance gets reissued. A checker that does not tell you how old its rules are is asking you to trust something you cannot inspect.

We maintain the library and we will say when a rule was last checked. We will not tell you that your posting is compliant. The checker produces flags, and a flag is a prompt for a person to look at something, not a determination. Whether a rule applies to your organisation depends on your headcount, your entity structure, where your employees sit and facts about the role that no tool can see from pasted text.

Your counsel is the authority on all of it. That is not a disclaimer added at the bottom to cover us; it is the correct division of labour. A tool is good at noticing that a posting has no range in it. It is not good at deciding whether your company is covered.

The checker will process the posting text to produce the flags and will not retain it. Nothing is written to a Surhires account, no account is required, and the text is not used to train a model or to build a job data set.

A job posting is usually your own content rather than somebody else's personal data, which makes this tool lower risk than the resume screener. It stops being low risk if the draft you paste contains a hiring manager's name and contact details, an internal salary band you have not published, or client information on an agency-drafted ad. Pasting a client's unpublished compensation band into a free web tool is a commercial and sometimes a contractual decision, and it is yours to make. Strip anything internal before you paste, and the check runs just as well.

It will not tell you what range to publish. A good-faith range is a judgement about what you would genuinely pay, informed by your bands and your market, and inventing one for you would be worse than useless. It will not check pay equity between existing employees, which is a different obligation with different data behind it, and it will not audit your internal bands.

It will not cover every jurisdiction. The library covers the rules we have reviewed, and it names them; anywhere outside that list comes back as not covered rather than as passed, because a silent pass on an untested jurisdiction is the most dangerous output a tool like this could produce. It will not post the job, and it will not monitor a live posting for a rule that changes after publication.

A free checker helps with one draft at a time. The problem it addresses is really a publishing-workflow problem: postings go out from templates, to multiple boards, edited by several people, and the one that goes out without a range is rarely the one somebody thought to check.

Inside Surhires the pay transparency validator runs against a posting before it is distributed to boards, using the jurisdictions the posting is actually being published to rather than the ones you remembered to select. The compliance posture on this is a capability statement rather than a certification: the product supports checking a posting against the salary-range disclosure rules of the places it goes to, and flags it before it goes out. What you do with the flag is your decision.