signal: Salary Absence

[LXBStudioLLC]

Spec

Tier: Weak
Name: Salary Absence

A low-effort or possibly-ghost hint: a posting in a U.S. pay-transparency jurisdiction that leaves out any salary or pay range. Employers covered by these laws are supposed to publish a range, so leaving it out in a covered state or city is a small red flag. This is correlational and weak. Plenty of real postings leave out salary, so this only ever adds a little to the evidence.

Data source

None. This is a local signal. It uses only posting.Location, posting.SalaryText, and posting.DescriptionText, plus a small hardcoded list of pay-transparency jurisdictions. RequiresNetwork = false.

Approach

1. Keep a small, documented hardcoded set of U.S. pay-transparency jurisdictions (for example California, Colorado, New York, Washington, Illinois, Hawaii, Minnesota, Maryland, plus a few cities). Make it easy to extend.
2. In EvaluateAsync(JobPosting): if posting.Location clearly maps to a covered jurisdiction, and posting.SalaryText is null or blank, and posting.DescriptionText has no pay range (a dollar amount, "per hour", "salary range", and so on), return a SignalResult with a low score and low-to-moderate confidence. Return null otherwise.
3. Be conservative on the location match. Require a Location-field match, not a description scan, and only when the jurisdiction is clear.

Precision rules

• Weak tier, low score. This must never move a posting's band on its own.
• Only fire on a clear covered-jurisdiction match. Remote, unknown, or not-covered returns null.
• Describe the pattern in the evidence, for example: "This posting is in {jurisdiction}, which requires a pay range, but none is listed." Never a verdict on the company.

Acceptance criteria

• Implements IGhostSignal with Name = "Salary Absence" and Tier = Weak
• RequiresNetwork = false. Local only, no network, no data files
• Returns null when the location is not a covered jurisdiction, a salary or range is present, or the location is unknown
• Never throws. Catch and return null
• Human-readable evidence. No verdict on a named company
• Tests use labeled fixtures (no network calls): covered state with no salary (fires), covered state with a salary (null), non-covered or remote (null)
• dotnet test passes, including ContainerResolutionTests
• PR targets main

Quick start

Copy the agent prompt from SIGNAL_AUTHORING.md, paste the Spec block above into it, and hand it to your coding agent. Good first signal, no external data, just local fields.