Take this job, and compare the pay online

(continued from previous page)

At PayScale, visitors to the site must complete a multi-Web page questionnaire and provide detailed information about their job, the responsibilities they have, their pay, the types of benefits they get--such as retirement and gym membership--the type of company they work for and how large it is, as well as supply their age, gender, education and years of experience.

The site recognizes that not all jobs with the same title are the same. For instance, there are several title options for "paralegal" depending on the responsibilities and years of experience, as well as type of law practice, such as insurance law versus personal injury. The pay scale range for any job is displayed on a chart and adjusted to the cost of living for the particular city or geographic area. A basic report, that tells you what percentile a person at that pay scale is in compared to others doing the same job in the same area, is free. A more detailed report costs $20.

PayScale also supplies detailed information to employers, human resource managers and salary consultancies. The data is richer and easier to use than the HR manager surveys that firms have traditionally sold to businesses, said David Roberts, vice president of human resources at home builder Robert Harris Homes in Woodstock, Ga. He uses the online tools to create different data searches by changing criteria, something you can't easily do with a paper document, he said.

"This allows you to see what's going on in the marketplace," Roberts said. "I use the data to determine what is fair pay at our organization, and when we are looking at (job) candidates to see what would be over pay and what would be under pay for them."

Such information at the hands of workers can empower them on an individual basis but won't necessarily change the hiring and promotion dynamic in companies in general anytime soon, said Jim Holincheck, a research vice president who covers human resources technology at Gartner.

"The unique thing PayScale does is collect data directly from employees," he said. "They do validate and compare it against salary data collected the traditional way" and provide a level of "granularity" that other sources don't. "This will be interesting for job boards and social-networking sites, places where people have an interest in comparing salaries," he said.

"The real question for people is will it make an impact on their negotiations with their employers," said John Challenger, chief executive of outplacement services firm Challenger Gray & Christmas. "Will the employers change their behavior based on this kind of information? I'm doubtful."

Small companies that can be flexible are more likely to pay heed to salary data from other sources like PayScale. But more bureaucratic, larger corporations may be reluctant to for fear they will have to adjust the salary of others in the group, he said.

Regardless of whether PayScale helps people get a raise in a current job or at a new job, Web surfers are likely to use it out of a voyeuristic tendency--being curious to see what pay others make and how that compares to them.

"Compensation is an emotionally sticky topic," said PayScale Chief Executive Mike Metzger. "We tend to tie a lot of our ego and self-worth into our compensation, and there are not a lot of external sources with this data."

[nmcphers]

Useful

I used information on Salary.com to negotiate a significant raise.

[optionjay]

I wonder how much information they have in here

They list DBAs in Sacramento making ~50k a year.

I don't think so.

[ReVeLaTeD]

Don't forget

Some of those DBAs might be underpaid. In Sacramento I'm sure they know full well that they are and may have contributed their data to deter others from getting shafted.

[shellyle]

www.salarybase.com

<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.salarybase.com" target="_newWindow">http://www.salarybase.com</a> worked like a charm for me - looks like more realistic figures

[rlaw68]

Inflammatory and misleading

These services suffer from several profound defects:

1) No verification of data.
2) Impossibly broad job categories / no standard rule for job descriptions.
3) (Seemingly) no control to set up standard deviations, so that a couple of overly high or overly low salaries in a group lead to improperly skewed data.

The end result is that in many cases either employees will think they're underpaid or employers will think they're overpaying, or both. And as a bonus, neither will really know if they're right, leading to needlessly disgruntled employees and unrealistic employers, which is good for neither.

The post above mentioned the DBAs in Sacramento being listed at bargain basement wages (thus unfairly biasing employers to pay them less everywhere, but especially in Sacramento)...we've looked at these services when hiring a senior manager and seen ranges from $85k to $600k+(!) for the EXACT same title, years of experience, etc. because somewhere they're being underpaid (or they have the wrong title -- COO of a 5 person company might have the same duties as a sales manager in a 500 person company) and somewhere else they're being overpaid ("Sales Manager" of a 5 person company might also actually be a co-owner).

Don't get me wrong -- all of these services are on the right track in terms of what they're *trying* to do, but the fact that people are relying on them for salary negotiations and/or compensation models is scary.

Look -- I've got a coin jar on my desk for loose change. It's mostly quarters. If the coin jar on your desk is mostly dimes, or is a bigger or smaller jar, or if one of us also throws one dollar bills in as "change" and then we post data about what the relative value of a coin jar is, what happens? Everybody starts thinking that something's amiss with their coin jar, right?