With the landscape of an unprecedented labour shortage, a new nationwide poll has revealed that businesses that don’t publish salaries when advertising jobs lose out on millions of applicants, as 20 percent of those polled said they would not bother to apply for a role if there was no salary mentioned.

And a further 57 percent of workers said they would be much less likely to apply for a job if the salary range wasn’t stated upfront.

In fact, the study of 2000 British office workers, by insights agency Perspectus Global, found that a staggering 90 percent of those polled believe that salaries should ALWAYS be included in job advertisements.

Of those, half (50 percent) said it was a waste of time applying for a job if you don’t know what the pay will be, and 44 percent believe that publishing salaries makes companies more transparent.

The same number (44 percent) said it’s the most important element of a job so it needs to be displayed, and a quarter (25 percent) claim that publishing salaries in job adverts helps battle the gender pay gap.

Said Jon Horsley of Perspectus Global: “With several states in the US having made it a legal requirement for employers to publish salaries on job ads, a backlash against the vague phrase ‘competitive salary’ is gaining momentum in the UK. The writing seems to be on the wall – if your salary is so competitive, why don’t you publish it? It’s likely that companies that don’t take heed will face a bigger recruitment challenge than those that do.”

The report also revealed other reasons why Brits won’t apply or accept new jobs and found that, while their application is being processed, 60 percent of respondents said that they had been made to jump through too many hoops interview stages of a job, such as having they to do “work for free” or numerous rounds of interviews.

Shockingly, HALF of all respondents say that they have said no to a job they were offered solely because of how this stage of recruitment was handled.

Said psychologist and employee experience consultant Debbie Martin “I’ve heard horror stories about people having to do eight interviews before getting jobs. I actually think it’s not the number of interviews that is the problem, it’s the fact that people aren’t clear about that at the start. If you know there’s going to be 4 interviews then you can prepare yourself for it but if they keep adding on stages, that’s a lot of extra aggravation.

“If employers keep adding on tasks or interview stages, this brings up a level of distrust, and you start to think ‘do they really want me?’ or ‘am I being set up to fail?’ It tends to be larger corporations with more bureaucracy, whereas start ups and more nimble organisations are much quicker to make offers – and I think this does mean that the more bureaucratic organisations are losing out on a lot of talent.”

The study also explored how people look for new jobs, and found that the initial search mainly takes place online with over 90 percent of people saying their first stop is a web search, LinkedIn, social media or recruitment sites.

A third of the youngest cohort of 18 to 29 year olds turn to social media to look for a job – nearly three times more than the over 45s. This suggests that recruiters in the future must have a well maintained social media presence.

Also, the youngest group were more than twice as likely to turn to Linkedin (35 percent) than the over 45s (17 percent).