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LinkedIn, Glassdoor Add Tools To Reveal Your Pay Potential (seattletimes.com)
Money isn't everything, but it counts for a lot at work. That's why work-related websites like LinkedIn and Glassdoor are adding new online tools to help professionals understand their salary potential (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source.) From a report on the Seattle Times: LinkedIn, which calls itself the social network for professionals, is adding a service that provides members with pay information for a variety of jobs, including a break-down by such factors as location, industry, education and experience. It's based on anonymized data submitted by LinkedIn members, including details about base pay and other compensation, such as bonuses and stock grants. The new service comes two weeks after Glassdoor, a competing online job site, introduced a feature that promises to help workers determine their "personal market value" by comparing their current job title, salary and related information with data from other workers and current hiring trends. Glassdoor's site already showed information about median salaries and perks, along with employees' reviews of what it's like to work at various companies. It says the new feature can be useful for job-seekers as well as workers who might want to negotiate a raise from their current employer.
with data from other workers
gosh it's SO TRUSTWORTHY, must be the truth
I tried the Linkin one last night and since it didn't have a drop down menu for the job title, I entered in mine only to be told it was not a valid title. I tried a few different permutations and none were accepted.
Sr Systems Engineer
Senior Systems Engineer
Systems Engineer
So much for that.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
These sites are dangerous. I just went through the process of setting salary ranges for a number of new hires and the discrepancies between the self-reported sites and the commercial data brokers are fairly large.
As best I can tell, most people reporting their salaries on Glassdoor (for example) are junior people who are either inflating their title/experience, rounding up their salary, or both. Also the higher up you go in titles, the wider the variance. Without information about sample size, it's hard to know if the range for, say, a CTO in Springfield is really $80k-300k or if they just happened to have two people report their salaries (or aspirational salaries).
Self-reported salary sites are simply too easy to game to be reliable. If I wanted to depress salaries in Springfield, I could just submit some carefully designed "employees" to skew the stats. Alternatively, employees appear to already be doing that to try to get salaries raise.
Once you're out of the "junior" part of your career (say 5 years of career maturity, regardless of your title), you tend to know your market value and what your salary trajectory will be (if not, talk to your co-workers about pay - that's how executives all keep their pay high, though they communicate via lawyers, board members, and SEC filings). At that point, you're not going to report to these sites.
Employees and job seekers have ready access to these sites and use the data when negotiating raise. The problem is that HR departments have access to commercial databases compiled from actual pay-stub data. This sets up employees for some awkward conversations when they try to justify their 150% pay increase + company Ferrari because someone on Glassdoor claimed that's what their compensation is.
-Chris
Glassdoor shows no effort for research. If you want to know what you are worth, first you need to tell them about yourself to great extents, which in turn will be shown to others like you as their earning potential. I refuse to provide free data, to those who will turn around and make a profit out of it. And the audacity of these people, when you ask them "what's in it for me ?" their answer almost always is, "you are helping your fellow colleagues" without mentioning, you are providing data to us, which we package and sell for razor sharp targeted advertising. Go pound sand glassdoor.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
I tried this feature out on Glassdoor, and have used others in the past, offered by various tech publications. (I believe it was InfoWorld who did one once, some years back?)
The problem I've always run into is that you often can't accurately determine what a person *really* does by job title, because employers get creative with titles in an effort to discourage this type of "salary shopping".
For example, many years ago, I was given a title of "PC Support Specialist" when everyone else I knew doing anything similar to me had a title of "Systems Administrator" or "Network Administrator", or even "Tier 3/4 Help Desk". It wasn't really appropriate for the place to have given me some kind of "tiered" help desk title because technically, we didn't HAVE a help desk. We just had an "all purpose" I.T. department that wore multiple hats, generally doing in person support for anyone in the office needing it. (Back then, remote workers were few and far between. We had dial in modem support for remote access services, but it was so slow and painful to use, people didn't do a whole lot with it.) But the fact was, the people I knew doing the same or LESS work than I did often had a title with "Administrator" in it, guaranteeing tens of thousands per year higher salaries than I got.
And in another previous job position, I was given a title of "Network Manager". It sounds relatively impressive since it has "Manager" in the title -- but think about that one for a minute. Does that title make ANY sense? Managers are hired to manage people, not things. In fact, I was the only full-time I.T. person in that company, and the only managing I *really* did was having permission to call in an outside computer service when I deemed it necessary for a project too large to handle by myself in a timely manner. Then I essentially managed the outside guy, paid hourly for his services.
I don't mean to sound all "sour grapes" about this.... I worked in both of those positions for years, each and liked a lot of things about them. (I had some great co-workers and in one of the two, reported directly to the company's owner who was a really great guy.) Salary isn't everything. But I'm just trying to point out that it's been my experience in I.T. over the years that the relatively "oddball" titles often signify a person who is put in charge of all sorts of things in a company's computer infrastructure and may have a breath of experience far more vast than others, yet puts them at a disadvantage if they try to apply for those better-paying jobs where they're looking for a hire to fill one of the more "well known job titles".
Social networks already know a lot about their users. Why would their users want to include their wages too? Sounds like one step closer to identity theft to me.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
And it takes even more control out of your hands.
We annually get reporting requests from the department of labor, a large percentage of companies do. The results end up here: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current...
If you want to look at wage information, that's a good place to go. It's not localized by region, but it's a decent overall report.
An important difference: You benefit from a raise by staying, but you benefit from a title-change by leaving.
So when an employee is valuable, giving them a nicer title in lieu of better pay might backfire.