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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.
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