Recruiter here.
Keep in mind that your salary is reflective of your market value, and is not directly tied to what your job is or how hard you work.
In the old days, we had more skilled workers than jobs. Which meant an employer could offer pretty much anything and someone would take the job. Today we have the opposite, we have many more jobs requiring skilled workers than skilled workers to fill them. This means salaries are dictated by a marketplace - i.e if what I offer is out of line with my competition, no one will work for me.
The issue is, like all markets, it fluctuates - Usually based on the economy, as well as demand for the skills in question.
What happens pretty naturally is that as I build a team over a long time, I end up with people being paid different amounts to do the same job. This can be a problem for companies as workers don’t often understand that their compensation is tied to their market value at the time of joining, not how hard they work once they’ve joined.
I think we basically end up with a situation where we can:
A) Pay employees individually assigned amounts negotiated at the beginning of their employment
B) Adjust employees salaries every time we hire a new staff member, based on what the market dictates at that time.
The issue with B, is that it’s all well and good putting salaries up. But what if we hire in a market downturn?We either have to reduce our existing staffs salaries, or pay everyone the highest amount we’ve ever hired at. If we go with the latter, we’ll have enormous overheads, and can easily be undercut by competition.
The reality is then, we either tie your salary to a fluctuating figure, or pay you a set amount determined at the time of joining, which may be different to your colleagues.