Sunday, March 4, 2007

Salary information for pay negotiations

It's a bit too late to be put to much use this year, but the NYT has an interesting article on online tools for salary negotiations. Link here (Free registration required).

To summarise, the article talks about the websites that provide information on standard compensation packages for your position and role. Using this information, it should be easier to negotiate your pay with a fact-based approach rather than "feelings-based" approach. The sites profiled are -
Salary.com (Available only in US)
Payscale.com (International)


I have used Payscale.com, but not salary.com. My views on this are as follows...

Salary.com collects its data from surveys of HR divisions.
-- So the figures it quotes would be very much from the HR point-of-view. I have a feeling that there will be too much importance given to some useless benefits that you will never use.
-- From a business-model point-of-view, the Salary.com approach is not easily scalable to other international locations, as they will need to build up strong relationships with the HR divisions of the companies in every location they want to enter.

Payscale.com is a Seattle-based startup that tackles the issue from a different angle. They collect salary information from actual employees who come to the site looking for salary information themselves.
-- For those of you who are very dubious as to the quality of the data; I have used it, and it works very well. When I go to Payscale.com looking for the standard comp. packages for project delivery managers, I am asked to fill out my current compensation package. After this is done, Payscale.com will provide me with the weighted/min/max packages for my position and also a comparison to my current package. This ensures that I have every incentive to fill out my data correctly.
-- From a business-model point-of-view, Payscale.com is highly salable to other locations, as all they need are employees in those locations to go to their sites and fill out the survey

I would recommend Payscale, after having used it. Their comp. figures are also indicative of the general trend.


Joe Neitham, a recruiter with the search firm Charterhouse Singapore provides the average tech compensation figures in Singapore and India based on data from Payscale.com. For those in Singapore, I would recommend subscribing to Joe's blog to keep abreast of the trends.

Previous related blog posts:
Pay checks in Indian IT, Finance and Manufacturing

3 comments:

Vinoj said...

Hey I read this on /. and I wanted to thank you for the heads up. I'm also reading the rest of your blog and you've got some great stuff!

Arun said...

@vinoj
Thanks.
You can subscribe to the e-mail notification which will send you an alert whenever I have new posts.

Joe Neitham said...

Hi Arun,
Great blog and good stuff. Thanks for the link.