We think a Hong Kong job ad should tell you what it actually pays
薪酬透明，人人有得比較。求職唔應該靠估。
HKjobs is a job board for Hong Kong where the salary band, the language requirement, the commute and the employer’s reply rate are all on the card — before you spend an evening on an application.
Hong Kong runs on a salary secret everybody is expected to keep薪酬保密的代價
Ask around a Hong Kong office and you will find people doing the same job, at the same desk bank, on packages that differ by a third. Nobody is lying. The information simply never travels — not between colleagues, not between the ad and the interview, and certainly not into the ad itself. “Salary negotiable” and “commensurate with experience” have been doing a lot of quiet work for a very long time.
The cost of that silence lands unevenly. If you have been in the market fifteen years, you know what the band is because you have sat on both sides of it. If you graduated last summer, moved here on an IANG visa, or spent eight years at one employer, you are negotiating blind against someone who does this for a living. That gap is not a talent gap. It is an information gap, and it is the whole reason this product exists.
What we changed
We made the pay band a required field. An employer who wants to advertise on HKjobs publishes a monthly range in HKD, says whether the thirteenth month is contractual or discretionary, and states the language level the job genuinely needs rather than the one HR pasted from the last spec. If they will not, the listing does not go live — and we lose the revenue, which happens more often than we would like.
Then we did the same thing to the parts of hiring nobody advertises. We publish how many applicants each employer replies to and how quickly. We label promoted placements as promoted. We show applicant counts on the listing so you can tell a quiet vacancy from a stampede. None of it is flattering to everyone, which is roughly how we know it is worth showing.
What we will not do
We do not charge job seekers. Not for applying, not for a “priority CV”, not for early access to a listing. Hong Kong caps what a licensed employment agency may take from a job seeker; treating that ceiling as a target was never interesting to us, so our figure is zero and it is in our terms, not just on a marketing page. Employers pay for placement and tooling. That is the whole business model.
Three years, one stubborn rule由二〇二三年至今
Every change below started as an argument with an advertiser.
- March 2023Founded二〇二三年三月
Two desks above a printing shop in Sheung Wan
We started by hand-typing 40 listings from employers who agreed to publish a real salary band. Half of them said no. The half that said yes got four times the applications, and that settled the argument.
- November 2023Product二〇二三年十一月
Salary became a mandatory field
Not a checkbox, not an optional extra — a required input with a validation rule. Employers who genuinely could not publish a band had to say why, and that reason appears on the listing instead.
- June 2024Product二〇二四年六月
Every listing mapped to an MTR station
A job in Kwun Tong and a job in Tuen Mun are not the same job, even at the same salary. We tagged every district to its nearest interchange so commute is a filter, not a surprise on day one.
- February 2025Trust二〇二五年二月
We started publishing employer response rates
The share of applicants an employer actually replies to, and how many days it takes. Several large advertisers asked us to remove it. We kept it, and their numbers went up within a quarter.
- October 2025Data二〇二五年十月
The first HKjobs Salary Guide
Built from disclosed bands on live Hong Kong listings rather than a survey emailed to HR departments. Twenty-five roles at launch, quarterly refresh, methodology published alongside the numbers.
- May 2026Product二〇二六年五月
Employer console, pipeline and structured screening
Posting a role takes four minutes and the whole hiring team sees the same board. No placement fee, no per-CV charge, and no candidate has ever been billed a cent.
- August 2026Today二〇二六年八月
Where we are today
A small team in Quarry Bay, a licence on the wall, and a rule we have not broken: if an employer will not tell a candidate what the job pays, the listing does not go live.
Where the board stands this morning今日數據
Counted live from the listings currently published, not from a deck.
- Live listings
- 141
- across 16 industries
- Publish a salary band
- 82%
- the rest must say why not
- Employers on the board
- 45
- 30 verified
- Districts covered
- 33
- 4 regions, MTR-mapped
- Visa-friendly roles
- 36
- IANG, GEP & TTPS welcome
- Charged to candidates
- HK$0
- since March 2023
Figures refresh with the listing set. Salary bands are monthly HKD unless a listing states otherwise.
Fourteen people in Quarry Bay團隊
Six of them decide what you see on a listing. Here they are.
Wong Ka-yee黃嘉怡
Co-founder & Chief Executive
Nine years placing candidates in Central and one too many conversations that started with “the salary is competitive”.
Daniel Ng吳達文
Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer
Built the search index that makes a Cantonese job title and its English equivalent return the same results.
Priya Raghunathan
Head of Data
Owns the benchmark methodology and refuses to publish a median off a sample she would not defend in public.
Chow Tsz-hong周子康
Head of Employer Success
Sits with hiring managers while they write the ad, then deletes the three requirements nobody actually needs.
Emily Sze施敏儀
Trust & Safety Lead
Checks business registrations, kills fee-charging listings within the hour, and answers every report herself.
Marco Belletti
Design Lead
Responsible for the fact that a salary band is the largest thing on a job card, and that it reads at 375px.
Four rules we have never quietly rewritten四條原則
The candidate never pays求職者永不收費
No premium tier, no “CV boost”, no fee to see a salary. Hong Kong law caps what a licensed agency may charge a job seeker; our number is simply zero, and it is written into our terms so it cannot quietly change.
Publish the number薪酬要見得光
A pay band, a response rate, a placement fee — if we know it and it changes your decision, it goes on the page. Promoted listings are labelled as promoted, every time, even when the advertiser would rather they weren’t.
Somebody replies一定有回覆
We measure how many applicants each employer answers and how fast, and we show it next to their logo. Ghosting stopped being invisible the day it got a number attached.
Written for Hong Kong為香港而寫
Cantonese, English and Mandarin as first-class languages. Districts, MTR lines, 雙糧, MPF, IANG and the 4-1-8 rule — the details a board built for somewhere else quietly drops.
Written about in
Harbour Business Weekly
“The board that made salary a required field.”
The Kowloon Ledger
“Response rates, published. Awkward for some advertisers.”
Pearl River Tech Review
“Search that finally understands a Cantonese job title.”
Victoria Quarterly
“A pay-transparency experiment with real data behind it.”
SAR Enterprise Daily
“Hiring tooling without the placement invoice.”
Lion Rock Weekly
“Small team, unusually stubborn about one rule.”
Outlets and quotations are fictional, created for this demonstration.
We hire the way we ask
everyone else to
Our own roles go on the board with a published band, a named hiring manager and a stated reply window — same rules, no exceptions. Two engineering seats and one data role open at the moment, all hybrid from Quarry Bay.
- Quarry Bayhybrid, three days in
- 14 peopleacross product, data and safety
- Band publishedon every internal role too