LinkedIn, Glassdoor Add Tools To Reveal Your Pay Potential (seattletimes.com) 57
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.
liars lie (Score:2, Funny)
with data from other workers
gosh it's SO TRUSTWORTHY, must be the truth
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Several years ago, I knew a guy who was filling out his "American Community Survey" from the Census Bureau at work.
He claimed to be an Unemployed African-American Lesbian CEO making 250 million a year. We all laughed.
All humor aside, self-reported results raise the uncertainty on the data sufficient to (1) make it useable, and more importantly, (2) make it credible to one's employer when using the data as leverage in a salary negotiation. . . .
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it's all bullshit QED
Idiots all the way down, which is why I paid an idiot to post this comment!
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Either that or "It is clear from your salary profile that we can no longer afford your services"
Job Title? (Score:3)
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]
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Senior System Engineer?
In the US, system engineer has two connotations:
Re: Job Title? (Score:1)
Systems. Just... "Systems".
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Yes it is? I was Senior Systems Engineer for 3 different roles... 2 in New Zealand, and 1 in the United States.
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You can't tell by his tagline? Obviously Organized Crime Systems.
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I was a Senior System Administrator for quite some time here (almost 8 years) but 2 years back, the organization moved to 'Plan, Build, Run' where I was slotted into the 'Build' team. As a result Administrator was switched out for Engineer. I'm not on call any more, don't work admin tickets, and basically provide next level support to the Run folks. The server build aspect of my previous title followed me to the Build team and now I pretty much attend meetings (20 hours worth most weeks), review and fix shi
Re:Job Title? (Score:4, Interesting)
forget about linkedin, it's only result will be stupid recruiters harassing you about jobs they read about from some *other* recruiter, that they are hoping to be a 3rd party broker for you. It'/s a cesspool, that's why I dropped it after being on there for five years. Make your own website, put your resume there and link it from some posts in good tech forums. Google will find it, and you'll get quality contacts
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Yea, I dropped it after a few years back in 2011, but 2 years back the company brought in all new management from CEO down quite a bit and new boss was a real pain in the ass. I toughed it out and he's gone and yea, I get a crap-ton of recruiter spam for both sides. I managed Windows NT way way back in the mid 90's and I still get recruiter garbage for admining Windows systems even though I've managed Unix systems since 97.
[John]
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Jeeze guys, the point isn't what the company calls me, it's that Linkedin either doesn't recognize the title which isn't surprising in that I've had quite a few odd titles over the years, but that it doesn't provide suggestions or a drop down select list of acceptable titles. It just says "wrong, guess again..."
[John]
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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]
Yea, LinkedIn is ok for digging up past coworkers or colleagues but pretty poor at actually displaying credentials. It thinks my university is the one I got a certification at while working, and my current job is as a director on a volunteer board. There is no way to tell it to change those things, so I get "xx Alumni work here" for a school I did not attend. I also get random "connect" request from people I do not know who have blank profiles, so I'm guessing they are random spammers; as well as some from
Self Reporting is not accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re: Self Reporting is not accurate (Score:2, Informative)
I wish you were right , but see Equifax Workforce Solutions
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Where do you get that idea? You can share your pay stub data with anyone you want, as can your employer.
Most employers highly discourage you talking about it - mostly because you'd get jealous when you hear the new guy gets more than you. Some companies will even fire over this.
How do you think companies know what to offer people coming in? They do research. just like Realtors. You compare what everyone else is doing, and copy them. To get data, you have to submit data.
But illegal? Go cite me a law. No
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At least in Colorado back in 2008 a law was enacted to make it illegal to discipline employees who discuss pay. It's still not something that's casually discussed but it's actually illegal to take action against an employee for doing it.
[John]
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Prohibiting disclosure of salary is already a violation of federal law, NLRB 8a1
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I am aware of anecdotal information where people on a team at a tech company did not get a raise that even covered cost-of-living increases for their community. They each went on Glassdoor and submitted salary surveys inflated by $50k or more for their roles in the hopes that it would make it difficult for their employer to recruit others at a lesser salary.
Poison pill.
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I never discuss current salary with places I'm applying to work at, on principal. All it does is punish loyalty. If you stick with a company long term, especially through difficult times, your salary doesn't rise as fast as if you switch every few years. I prefer to offer loyalty and proven desire to gain a deep understanding of a business and its products, rather than discuss current salary and take the financial hit because of it.
The data is already out there, its called the OES (Score:2)
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... [bls.gov]
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.
Gimme free data. Yeah right ! (Score:3, Interesting)
The job titles are often the "catch" .... (Score:4, Informative)
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".
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An official inflated job title is a good thing - on your resume.
You may think that the company is giving you something worthless, but on a resume, it's official documentation that you're doing a higher job than you were hired in for. Use that acknowledgement as part of your resume to make the next hop easier.
That's why in your work history section, you list the last job title you had with an employer, not the first. When you hop, get more pay at the new job than what you should have been making at the pre
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Easy fix - search (or self report) on the industry standard title of your job. Forget your actual internal title it, when you're shopping for a new job or doing research.
Sites like those in TFA are very valuable when moving to a new job role, or applying for a different job than you've been doing. You have to know if that hop is a move up or a move down.
tl;dr: NAT your title for improved results.
Privacy (Score:2)