Salary transparency in the Croatian IT sector 

Bornfight, the company behind tabu.hr was the first to announce salaries publicly and now they are encouraging others to do the same. The idea was born from a simple ‘industry grapevine’ about the average developer salary in the Croatian IT industry. Tomislav Grubišić, Bornfight’s CEO, decided to create, upload and share a simple online questionnaire to get honest feedback, and people responded.  

After some time, employees across the industry started using the online form to navigate their salary negotiations. So this moment created a sense of responsibility and an idea… Why not make everyone join forces and share information? 

As we started with this platform in Croatia, and it greatly impacted both employees and employers, it could easily expand to other countries in the future. The marketing and human resources functions are other fields where we see great potential for expansion.

Tomislav Grubišić, CEO Bornfight

The platform 

tabu.hr is currently trending with over 40% of entries from the Croatian IT sector, including all role types, with over 60% being developers. Bornfight launched the platform on the 21st of March and recorded more than 35,000 visits in one day.

The platform allows employees and employers insights into the same or similar work according to various criteria such as city, industry, company type, seniority, experience, and employment type. 

If there are less than five entries for a combination of filters, TABU will not show stats for that filter combination. This means people don’t have to worry if their entry is unique for a particular position, seniority level and other parameters, as the results are not displayed until enough results are collected to guarantee anonymity. Besides that, TABU will not show personal information such as e-mail, gender, or date of birth.

Tomislav Grubišić, CEO Bornfight

This story is not only relevant because of salaries. It becomes important because it can show a candidate how much time they must spend in a particular role to get to a certain level of seniority. It can also help with unnecessary job changes and provide rational decision-making backing and more informed career management. 

From the employer’s side, it might encourage them to acknowledge the salary standard and a need for the career development path before they decide to leave if the salary is the primary motivator. 

The Pandora’s Box

One could say that this will probably catch some companies by surprise in industries not yet ready to share the traditionally well-guarded employee information. 

Similarly to the famous box in this myth which was apparently a jar, tabu.hr started a debate about whether it holds a gift to humankind or introduces a bunch of new problems. We think tabu.hr has definitely started a small revolution, and that a little bit of market upset now and then is a good thing. 

Gender Pay Gap

In its recent article Experts call on more firms to copy PwC’s pay transparency, the Australian Financial Review speaks about the gender salary gap. Even though hiring and recruiting platforms feature an average salary bracket for the widest role ranges and industries respected by ‘serious’ companies, the gap is still there. 

‘Data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) shows that the professional, scientific and technical services sector, where consulting firms would sit, had the second largest gender pay gap of all industries at 29.5 per cent as of 2020-21.’ 

‘The agency noted in a 2015 submission, ‘research evidence from Australia, the US and the EU suggest that pay secrecy may contribute to the gender pay gap’.’

According to the latest Eurostat data for 2019, the average pay gap between men and women in Croatia was 11.5%. Based on the results that TABU gathered, we can say that there is still a significant pay gap in Croatia and other countries, as some of the participants work for international companies remotely from Croatia. Some reasons for the existing gaps and differences are structural and related to the type of work, education and experience in the market. Thus, the significant differences in, for example, development in favour of men can partly be explained by the higher representation of men with higher education in these industries and more interest in development roles. 

Tomislav Grubišić, CEO Bornfight

The effect 

And to close this article appropriately as Carrie Bradshaw would, ‘I couldn’t help but wonder’ will Bornfight’s idea save Croatia from future exodus stampedes? Because why leave if you can work from anywhere and be similarly paid?