While I would not have gone further with a candidate who was paid two or three times the expected earnings of a position, I certainly would be open minded if that candidate also explained not just that it was a short term contract, etc…but rather that all positions prior to the windfall role were paid in line with expected earnings for the position, with an example or two. That's part of why I don't just ask for most recent salary…I recently had a candidate who had only been with their current employer 9 months, and my query exposed that they'd received a 25% salary bump in that move. I'm not going to tack on another 25% to move them to my company; that's insane unless they're just that valuable.

Shame on the recruiter for being closed minded enough to not ask about prior roles once you disclosed the anomaly of your last position, but it's up to you to set their concerns aside, not the recruiter. Perhaps you were this specific and just didn't mention it in your post. If that's the case, I'd say this was just a poor recruiter, and that can happen in any situation – if it doesn't click, it doesn't, and if it's a reflection on the company's mentality, you're probably better off without them too. That said, if this is a pattern of the conversations with the employment you're seeking, I'd adjust your strategy.

Well, the recruiter asked me over and over and over and over again over multiple phone calls. I told him literally at least five times that my current salary was not relevant to the job they were planning to make me an offer for, and asked what they were planning to pay. After a while he told me that they could not offer me a position if I didn't answer the question, so I said yet again that I was currently in a very short term and unusual position, and that I did not expect to make anything like this wage at a steady job, and told him I was making $60/hour. He said he would get back to me, and I never heard from him again. I phoned him back a few days later to ask what was going on, and he said, "Oh, you're too rich for our blood!" to tell me they were not going to make the offer.

This was, needless to say, extremely frustrating, particularly since I had explicitly told them that I wasn't expecting my current salary at the new job. What should I have done, lied and made up a number that was only a bit high for the normal pay for that job? I've wondered since then if they had no real plan to offer me a position and would have withdrawn the proposed offer no matter what I had said — is that at all likely?

-Penelope