How much money you feel you are worth can make or break a job application. But is it fair for interviewers to ask you to name your price?

London:

Imagine you’re bidding for a job and your bid isn’t actually how much you’ll pay but how low a wage you’ll accept. Laughable concept, isn’t it? Yet in reality that’s what German recruitment site www.jobdumping.de does. Fortunately, the recruitment community at large wouldn’t dream of getting candidates to undercut each other, but they might well ask you to “state your expected salary’’ — and for most candidates that’s simply job dumping by another name.

John Davies was excited when he found a job with a specialist publishing company; it was a move away from the IT industry he’d worked in for several years, towards a more creative role. “The job seemed perfect,’’ he says. “The only problem was they wanted me to state the salary I expected and I had no idea what to put. It’s just cruel — it makes you worry you’re going to get written off because you’ve said a stupidly high salary, or worse, you’ll end up working for peanuts if you undercut other applicants.”

There’s nothing illegal about companies asking you to name your price, and HR professionals admit salary expectation can make a difference between two similar candidates. So how can you make sure money doesn’t become an issue if you find yourself in this situation?

The ideal solution is to offer very little personal information while still answering the question. For example, “I believe these jobs within this industry attract salaries of between x and y” would be a good way of saying everything, while saying nothing.

To do this successfully, though, you will have to do some research, says Charles Cotton, pay and rewards adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. “There are a number of ways of finding out pay information. One of the best is to look to the professional body for that particular industry or job. Recruitment companies also collect data by industry and job, so they could be good to approach. Alternatively, there are some websites that list this sort of information.’’

The quality of these websites varies widely and it is essential to check what sample size their statistics are from, otherwise you might end up providing an average salary based on two people.

An alternative approach is simply to avoid the question or be vague. If you’re feeling confident, you could even turn the question around and ask the company what value it places on the role.