Search for Salaries at SalaryScout.com
12.02.2006Are you getting paid the market rate for your job? Find out at SalaryScout.com where you can search voluntarily and anonymously submitted profiles of employees’ skills, job requirements and compensation.
The site’s great idea but very basic (as it should be for a first release). It only allows you to search profiles by job title and view an employee’s location, experience, degree, company info and, of course, salary and benefits. The site is as anonymous as it can be and when asking for company info it asks for non-distinguishing features like company size, age, and annual income. But there’s nothing to stop the user from making a distinguishable username or submitting identification information on one of the various inputs.
My suggestion for the site would be to add better sorting and data analysis. Viewing each profile piecemeal is a relevant, but the information would be more powerful and compelling, from a statistical standpoint, if it were consolidated. This, however, is not an easy task and one with which HR departments struggle. Just the mere classification of jobs seems like a useless exercise, especially in a quickly changing world. SalaryScout offers the kind of qualitative salary information that you would get from asking a friend.
The founder’s goal was to prevent “corporate politics, experience, and age [from being] important factors in determining compensation,” which I think is noble. Compensation should be 100% skill based, but I doubt much will change. And even if those factors are made to be not important, negotiating will still be a large determiner of what you get paid. And since an employee’s value is ruled by supply and demand, which can fluctuate, SalaryScout is an invaluable resource to check from time to time, when you want to find out what your market value is.