true. my friend graduated from NUS on scholarship, currently working in MAS. starting pay was about 3.3K or 3.5k. after probation 3 months increase to 4k.

now almost 1 yr liao. is around 4.5K

Why HR ask for your previously drawn pay
 

I'm a HR Professional. Regardless of how many years of work experience, HR will usually ask for your last drawn pay. So in quoting "starting salary" is totally irrelevant.

The reason why HR ask for your last drawn pay is to know your likely expectations. If the company only has a budget of $5,000 monthly salary and your last drawn pay is a monthly salary of $7,000, do you think the company wants to hire you? The first question that will be in my mind is "why is this person willing to get such a huge pay cut?". The next question will be "if I hire him, how long will he stay?". Recruiting a new hire and train them (be it on-the-job training or formal training courses) is not cheap. Every time a Staff leaves, it affects the whole team performance. It affects business. If they do not get a pay they expect, they will be dissatisfied and will not be able to perform and sooner or later will resign. This is costly to the company. Some people will not be truthful about their expected pay. They may just want to leave their organisation due to bad work environment and just want to use another company as a temporary stepping stone. They just bare with the pay cut for a while and once there is an opportunity to jump ship, they will. This is the reason for asking your last drawn pay. If you already have 7 years of work experience, who really cares about your starting salary? Will your current expected salary be based on what is recent or starting salary? If a person is unemployed for a year and even if last drawn pay is $10,000 per month but willing to get $7,000 per month now, I may believe but $10,000 just last month but claimed to be willing to get $7,000 per month now, I will not believe without more information.

Good employers look beyond your starting salary. If one's competencies are trash, just overly paid previously, I will not be keen to hire such a person. Firstly, I will believe this person may have unrealistic pay expectations due to previous job. Secondly, I will not believe much value can be created by this person. In this sense, competencies acquired is far more important than salary. Having said this however, it is weird if pay is not increased if that person is really very good. Employers will want to keep good Staff. So if a competent person still has low pay after years, then it may leave employers wondering why. This again, is about last drawn pay, not starting pay.

How fast you climb the corporate ladder is not how much you earn but how competent you are. It is far more important to acquire the competencies for the next level than your pay. What is a few hundreds more as compared to a HoD that earns 5 digits per month? If you can acquire the competencies fast enough, you can become a HoD by 10 years of work experience. Even when not able, you probably will have the competencies that not many people will have and can command a high pay by then. Plan your career well instead. Where do you want to be 20 years from now? Look at the Job Description and Person Specification and then work backwards until entry level. Plan your career development plan and slowly acquire the competencies until that ultimate position you want to be. HR if professional enough will look for both your abilities and passion. It is such person that will perform. Giving high pay to one that is incompetent and lack of passion is just a bad investment.

No point giving text book answer not tied to reality at all.

Each individual's pay and career progression is determined by a multitude of factors which includes but not limited to cultural fit, patronage lines, years of experience, experiences in CV, academic qualification, competency, office politics, plain old fashion luck (being right place at right time under right boss), age, inter-department power struggle, industry wide market dynamics, function wide labour dynamics and general marcoeconomic situations.

To declare that competency is the one most important factor in pay and career progression simply defies observations on reality. The IT/ITES industry is a good example. Many local IT professionals are beating South Asians hands down in competency, yet they lost out badly while the openly acknowledged incompetent sychophants who happen to share the same skin color move on to Directors and VPs by smart political manuvering, patronage, cultural contamination and riding on the general trend of South Asians dominating the industry. Look at your own HR function, can you confidently say that those who move on to Heads of HR are the most competent in your department?

Newbies like to ask smple questions that demand simple answers like "what determines my pay and career" hoping that somebody can just give a one sentence simple answer. Unfortunately like all predictions of the future, what transpires in the future is a product of multi-faceted forces at work and does not lend itself to a simple answer.

If you are really so into HR, you would have encountered countless employees coming to your desk complaining about career and salary inequity. The proportion of cases sucessfully resolved by HR is small because they do not have a strong and solid argument to convince others of such inherent consistencies that exist in every organization. There just is no simple clear cut answer.

True. This reminds me also of the usual bo liao question like "what make you a sucessful entrepreuner/trader/investor?". As if there is anyone in the world who can just give a clear cut straight forward answer.