I've been through entire interview processes (multiple hour long interviews over days) to get to this point, so a phone screen doesn't seem so bad. Anyone have hints on how to gracefully breach the salary topic? I've also had technical interviews where the interviewers are attempting to gauge my "seniorness" because apparently resume and work experience isn't enough to determine this. It's possible that many companies want to adjust salary based on perceived interview performance.
One time an hr person called me to schedule an interview (after I'd submitted my resume thru stackoverflow iirc) and I just asked her; can you offer at least X? She put me on hold, talked to the hiring manager and said no. I replied thanks, not interested. Ymmv
"Anyone have hints on how to gracefully breach the salary topic"
My tip is: don't be graceful. It's stupid, but the subjective perception people will get when you approach the topic straight up and say "I run 250k/year, is that within your range, before we go any further?" is powerful.
The first thing that happens is that you get slotted for the higher level positions right away, will talk to more important people, and do the more interesting interview (that is often not any harder than what they ask college grads. It's just less "please write a hashmap on a whiteboard!"), so you'll get the job anyway, but make 100k more a year or whatever.
