Is My Salary Offer Competitive? When the Salary Is Too Low for What You’re Asking For

Last updated: October 14, 2026

A salary offer is competitive when it beats what your best candidate earns today and pays for everything else the job asks of them, from the level and the scope to the office days and the risk of moving. Most offers that feel low aren’t low against the title. They’re low against the ask.

By Samantha Litman, Executive Search, Marketing, Creative & Media, KORE1

“Is the compensation too low for what I’m asking for?”

Clients ask me that one constantly. I like the question. I like the second half of it even more, because that’s the half almost everybody skips.

Too low for what, exactly? A salary isn’t low in a vacuum. It’s low next to something. Maybe it’s low next to the level you wrote down. Maybe it’s fine for the level and low for the four days a week in the office, or for the take-home project, or for the second job you quietly folded into the first one. When a client tells me the number isn’t working, my job is to find out which of those it is, because each one has a different fix and only one of them is “spend more money.”

I’ve been recruiting for more than 25 years, and these days I run marketing, creative, and media searches as one of KORE1’s marketing recruiters. So I’ll tell you how I take a client’s offer apart. And yes, I get paid when you hire. I’d still rather you fix the job than overpay for it.

What Does “Competitive” Actually Mean?

A competitive salary is one the person you want would actually leave their current job for. That’s it. Not the national median, not the average on a salary site, not what your last hire made. It’s measured against the job your best candidate already has, plus whatever your job asks of them that their current one doesn’t.

That definition changes who you’re competing with. You aren’t competing with other job postings. You’re competing with your candidate’s Tuesday.

And right now their Tuesday is pretty comfortable. The Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker, which follows the same workers’ hourly pay twelve months apart using Current Population Survey data, put median pay growth for people who changed jobs at 4.7% in September 2026, against 3.4% for people who stayed where they were. A gap of 1.3 points. Both numbers slipped from the month before, when switchers were at 5.0% and stayers at 3.6%.

Read that slowly. Over the past year, the market paid people very little extra for moving.

Which matches what I hear on calls. Good people are out there. Whether they’ll move in a shaky market is the real question, and a thin raise for switching is exactly why so many of them don’t. So when your offer is just a little more than they make now, you haven’t really given them a reason. You’ve given them a rounding error and a new commute.

Price the Whole Ask, Not the Title

Economists have a name for this. A compensating differential is the extra pay a job needs because of something about it people don’t want, like hard hours, risk, or a long commute. You don’t need the term. You already know the idea. Would you take the same salary for a job that’s farther away and twice the work? Neither would they.

So before you decide the number is wrong, list everything the job is asking for. I mean everything. Here’s what I look for on an intake call, and what each one tends to do to the offer.

Here’s how that plays out. Ad operations seats in my recent searches have paid $65,000 to $80,000. Fine. Now picture the description that comes in with ad ops at the top, then media planning, then a weekly client call, then five days a week in the office, then a three-part trafficking test due in four days. The salary still says ad ops. The job doesn’t. I had a version of that search, and candidates kept saying yes to the number and no to everything around it. We didn’t fix it with money. We fixed the job.

Ever notice how nobody argues with the salary on a job that’s easy to say yes to?

Office Days Have a Price, Even If Nobody Writes It Down

I’m not going to tell you to go remote. Some creative work is better in a room together, and I’ve seen it. But know what you’re asking for.

Nick Bloom, the Stanford economist who has spent years surveying workers on this with Jose Maria Barrero and Steven Davis (their NBER working paper drew on more than 30,000 Americans), told NBC News in 2025 that the average worker treats the option to work from home as roughly an 8% raise, a figure he called “remarkably stable.” On an $80,000 seat that’s about $6,400 a year.

You won’t see that on an offer letter. Your candidate has already added it up, probably on the drive home.

So if the person you want has three home days now and your job has none, your offer has a hole in it before anyone talks about base pay. Either fill it with money, or give a little of the flexibility back and keep the money where it is. Both work. Pretending the hole isn’t there doesn’t.

The Test Project Nobody Budgets For

This one’s specific to my world. Creative hiring loves a take-home.

Design a campaign concept, build three style frames, rework our brand deck, write five headlines. Due Monday. Unpaid. AIGA, the professional association for design, describes speculative work as “work done for free, in hopes of getting paid for it” in its position on spec work, and it says plainly that clients risk getting compromised quality from it, since little time and thought can go into work nobody’s paying for. That’s their language for client pitches. A long hiring test lands in the same place.

Who finishes a weekend-long unpaid test? People with free weekends. Often that means people between jobs, or early in their careers. The senior art director with a full-time job and two kids reads the brief, does the math, and quietly withdraws. You’ll never hear why. You’ll just notice your finalists got more junior, and you’ll wonder if the salary is the problem.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s the test.

If you need to see someone think, pay for the test, cut it to something that fits in an hour or two, or ask them to walk you through a real project from their portfolio instead. I’ve watched a forty-five-minute portfolio walkthrough, where the candidate talks through a real campaign, what the client pushed back on, and what they’d change now, tell a hiring manager more than a week of unpaid homework ever would have.

How to Tell It’s the Number, and When It Isn’t

Clients want a yes or no from me here. I can’t always give one on day one. I can usually give one by week three, because by then the search has started talking back.

Look at who’s still in it. If nearly everyone saying yes is currently out of work, your offer probably isn’t moving anyone who has a job. That’s a pay signal, or a test-project signal, and it’s worth figuring out which.

Listen to what candidates push on first. When a strong person asks about home days, or the title, or the scope, before they ever ask about base, the number may be fine and the ask is what’s bothering them. People negotiate the thing that hurts.

Counteroffers keep winning at the very end? Then your raise for moving is too thin, and the Atlanta Fed numbers above tell you why it feels that way right now. You don’t always need more base to fix that. A sign-on payment that covers the bonus they’re walking away from is often cheaper than a permanently higher salary, and it answers the exact objection they have.

Now the other side. If candidates are excited through the first call and fade after they meet the team, that’s rarely about money. I wrote about that pattern, and the questions to ask the people who dropped out, in why you can’t find the right candidate. And if the yes pile is full of good people who just don’t have one specific background you listed, that’s a requirements problem, not a pay one. Check whether your job requirements are too specific before you touch the budget.

If the Number Can’t Move, Shrink the Ask

Budgets are real. I’d never tell a client to just go find more money, because sometimes there genuinely isn’t any, and I’d much rather work with the real budget and the real constraints than pretend we can wish a bigger number into existence. So when the number is fixed, we go back to that table and take things off it.

Give back two office days. Pay for the test, or replace it. Move the start date past the candidate’s bonus date. Take the second job off the description and hire for the first one well. Offer a title that matches the work, because a candidate weighing a lateral move will take a smaller raise for a real step up on paper, and they won’t take a smaller raise for a step sideways. None of those cost what a bigger salary costs, and every one of them makes the same number worth more to the person you want.

Remember, I’m usually the first one to say your number out loud to the candidate, so give me something I can explain. “$78,000 base, Tuesday through Thursday in the office, a one-hour exercise you get paid $250 for, and the last person in the seat made senior in two years.” I can sell that on a Wednesday afternoon to someone who already has a job. A $90,000 number with five unspoken asks behind it, I mostly can’t, because the candidate finds every one of them by round two.

What doesn’t work is keeping the whole ask and the small number and hoping the right person comes along anyway. They might. I’ve seen it. I’ve also seen roles sit open for months waiting for that person, and an empty seat isn’t free either.

If you want to check the number itself first, KORE1’s salary benchmark assistant is a free starting point, our compensation benchmarking guide covers how to set a pay strategy properly, and the role-by-role figures from my recent searches are in what marketing and creative roles pay in 2026, along with the posting-range rules in California and New York.

Questions Hiring Managers Ask Me About Pay

How much more than their current salary does an offer need to be?

There’s no fixed rule, and anyone who gives you one exact percentage is guessing. The baseline is that job switchers’ pay grew 4.7% over the past year against 3.4% for people who stayed, per the Atlanta Fed’s September 2026 tracker. A candidate who’s happy where they are needs more than that thin gap to take the risk, and anything else your job asks for adds to it.

We lost our top candidate at the offer stage. Was it the money?

Sometimes, but a lost offer is usually a mix of base pay, office days, and a counteroffer, so ask the candidate which one mattered most. Most people will tell you if you ask kindly and don’t argue. Maybe the base was a little short. Maybe the commute stung, or their boss suddenly found money. Whichever it was tells you what to change for the next candidate.

Can hybrid days make up for a lower salary?

Hybrid days can close a small pay gap, since Stanford economist Nick Bloom’s research puts two or three home days a week at about 8% of pay for the average worker. They won’t close a big one. And they only count if the candidate actually wants them.

Should we pay candidates for a take-home test?

If it takes more than an hour or two, I’d pay for it or shrink it. Long unpaid tests filter out busy, employed people first, which is usually the opposite of what you want.

Who should we compare our offer against?

Compare it against the job your best candidate has right now, not against a national median. The median tells you roughly where a role sits, but the person you want is weighing your offer against their current salary, their current schedule, and how much they like their boss. That’s the comparison that decides it.

Is a recruiter going to tell us to pay more no matter what?

Not a good one, because sometimes the honest answer is that your number is fine and the job is asking too much. Fixing the job is cheaper. Usually by a lot. If a recruiter’s only advice is a bigger number, ask them what else they looked at.

So, Is Your Number Too Low?

Maybe. Or maybe it’s right for a job you haven’t written yet.

Run the list. Office days against what they have now, at roughly 8% of pay for two or three home days. A test that eats a weekend. A second job tucked under the first title. A bonus they’d forfeit in March. A switching raise that, per the Atlanta Fed, ran at a median 4.7% against 3.4% for staying put. Put your number next to all of that instead of next to the title, and the answer usually shows up in about ten minutes.

KORE1 has recruited since 2005, and the firm’s 12-month retention rate on placements is 92%. People stay when the offer matched the job they actually got. Most of my searches are permanent, so a direct hire search is usually how we’d run it.

What are you asking for, and what are you paying for it? Bring me both. Let’s talk, or find me on LinkedIn if a quick message is easier.