You wait until you get the offer letter.

You tell them your salary expectations up front

Both are correct. If you have a recruiter or HR person that you are working with, they should be narrowing the field of interview candidate down based upon the candidate’s salary expectations. Post interview, an offer should be made and negotiation can proceed. I like to negotiate for extra vacation time as an alternative to $$. It sounds like you are midway through the process and should wait for an offer.

Where I have reached in my career, salary is the first thing I ask of unless it's a big tech company. I don't want to waste my time

Always ALWAYS ask before you even interview. Why are you wasting your time and theirs potentially if you aren’t sure if this is within doable range? Because let’s be honest they have a budget they can pay, if that is below what you need to be making, then there is no world where negotiations are going to go well just because they’ve spent weeks on interviewing you.

Ask before. It's a good practice to ask early in the interview process so you don't waste time if the salary doesn't match what you're looking for.

I always get salary and expectations first thing, like, when talking to recruiter early. No need to waste either party's time wondering.

If you’ve already started interviewing you prob need to wait until the offer but going forward you should definitely discuss with the recruiter before wasting anyone’s time if you’re not in the same ballpark. For example in two different companies I worked for there was a $200k+ difference in what a Director level person was paid.

Personally, I think you need to establish expectations early. Considering the number of interviews candidates are put through, you don’t want to go through 7 rounds and find out that they are only offering something that is 30% less than you are willing/able to take. So, I think you should establish their range early.

You definitely let them know during the recruiting process because you do not wanna waste your time going through an interview and they’re way off your salary

I discuss salary with the recruiter. If we're not in the same range, there's no point in continuing and wasting everyone's time.

Ask and get it out of the way

Unless you know salary from Glassdoor you mention it as soon as appropriate to the Hr person neither you nor them want to waste time

I ask for the salary range doing my initial call with the recruiter. Otherwise, you can find yourself interviewing (be waste of time) for positions that don't meet your salary requirements. However, if you've already had this discussion then you wait until you get the offer letter to negotiate.

If you are concerned at the end of a positive conversation that the range is too low, you can ask for the range. Just be polite and position it in such away that you wouldn't want to disappoint each other if the range was not a match.

The situation is that a former manager reached out to ask if I wanted to be their Chief of Staff for a new startup they are founding. I talked to them as well as someone else on the exec team but salary never came up. Now im talking with the recruiter and she’ll be the last person I speak with, so we did the process kind of backwards. Should I still ask if she doesn’t mention or wait for the offer?

I’d be concerned if it hadn’t come up yet.

I ask for a salary range up front before even taking an interview.

Would also ask beforehand to not waste each other’s time, especially since my last two experiences each consisted of multiple rounds, tests, presentations, and panels stretching out 2-4 weeks. I’ve been told to delay until the end by some and at least you will get to practice but that seems exhausting.

This should have been discussed with your recruiter before your first interview so as to not waste anyone's time. If no recruiter and not published, it's fine to discuss with the hiring manager before the first interview (see above). Negotiating vacation time? No likely if they have a set policy unless C-level. Learned this long ago. Since you are waiting for the offer letter, negotiate after you receive it. It's a bit late to bring up now.