Using the Web to Get the Boss to Pay More (Published 2007) (2024)

If information is power, then most employees who enter salary negotiations are holding pea shooters while the boss is encased in a Kevlar vest.

Unless someone left a spreadsheet of the company’s salaries on the copier (funny how often that does happen), most employees have precious little ammunition going into a meeting to talk about their pay.

A few Web sites try to level the playing field by providing more detailed information about salaries. Salary.com began revealing the results of salary surveys on its site in 1999. PayScale.com is now challenging it by gathering information directly from the people who search for data. (A third site, Payscroll.com, is testing a method of trolling job listings for salary information. It will be opened to the public this month or next.)

New Internet technologies are providing information that has never been available to the average person and transforming the way they sell homes or buy airline tickets. It could have the same effect on the 47 million people who look for new jobs each month and the countless others who think they are underpaid at the ones they have.

Jessica Morrison, who wrote advertising copy for Drugstore.com in Seattle, was one of those. After five years at the company and several promotions, her title was associate editor even though she had the same duties as a copywriter, a loftier title. She also suspected that at $42,000 a year, she was paid a lot less than someone else with her duties.

She checked PayScale, and its free report that compares her pay with others holding a similar job title said that someone with her experience should be making $50,000 to $60,000. Then she went to see her manager. “I was a little nervous going in, but I had done my research,” Ms. Morrison, 27, said. She got the title she wanted and a raise to within the pay range she suggested. “If I had gone in without the information, the conversation would have been, ‘I feel like I am not making enough money,’ ” Ms. Morrison said.

More extensive salary surveys are done for corporations, but a regular employee could not hope to buy the information from any of the other major compensation companies like the Hay Group or Mercer. “We wouldn’t give it to you,” said Iain Fitzpatrick, general manager of the reward information service division of Hay. The compensation companies do not want their information being used against bosses negotiating salaries. “The last thing we want is for a client to say, ‘We just had a conversation with an employee who was quoting Hay data,’ ” Mr. Fitzpatrick said.

Unlike Salary.com, which obtains its information from a variety of surveys of corporate human resource departments, PayScale collects the information directly from people seeking the data. If you want PayScale’s salary information, first you will have to tell them what you make. A basic report is free, but the company charges $20 for a more detailed analysis.

PayScale, which supplies its data to job listing sites like CareerBuilder.com, Jobster.com and SimplyHired.com, says it uses search engine technology and a rules-based algorithm to match requests for data in a database of 5.5 million profiles.

Executives at Salary.com, which provides its data to job boards at America Online, Yahoo, HotJobs.com and Monster.com, take issue with the new approach. Their survey found 96 percent of human resources departments do not trust user-reported data. William Coleman, senior vice president for compensation at Salary.com, said, “People get information wrong.” He said they often did not understand what benefits or bonuses they were getting, so he considered any self-reporting to be suspect.

But Joe Giordano, the founder, chairman and also vice president for product development at PayScale, said its information was accurate. “People come onto PayScale with no incentive to lie because they want high-quality information,” he said.

The company checks the information for inconsistencies, tossing out extremes. It said that about 50 percent of submissions were not included, but that it got enough, about 300,000 a month, that no single filing could influence the overall result. “We collect more in one day than some companies collect in a year,” said Michael Metzger, the chief executive.

It takes about six minutes to fill in its questionnaire. PayScale asks for your title, the number of years in the field and your city. It then asks you to better define your job. If you said software programmer, it wants to know what kind of programmer and what programming languages you know. People in professions with a profusion of titles are asked more questions.

Finally, it asks you questions about your employer, your education, and, of course, your salary and benefits.

Then it computes the results and displays them on a graph so you can see the range. A senior software engineer in Silicon Valley with 20 years of experience makes $88,531 to $106,364. A benefits claims examiner in Indianapolis, who has been on the job for a decade, makes $41,122 to $54,821.

Although Salary.com argues that its paid results are more accurate, its free Salary Wizard tool yields results that can barely differ: for example, a range of $84,289 to $107,711 for the programmer and $40,091 to $52,942 for the examiner.

PayScale, which gets about a third of the traffic that Salary.com does, says it has information on jobs not usually found in corporate salary surveys like p*rnographic film actor (average salary: $63,275), rabbi (average salary: $98,610) and crossing guard (average hourly wage: $9.21), but so far no chick sexers, mimes or bloggers are in its roster. “We don’t get many boiler makers, but we get the jobs that are out there in volume,” Mr. Giordano said.

PayScale data also say that a chief executive in New York City averages $248,278. When you stop laughing, it quickly becomes apparent what the big problem with this site is. It is most accurate where it has lots of data. The company acknowledges that it is very good with high-tech jobs, health care and nonprofits because a lot of people from those professions have visited the site and filled out the questionnaire.

Only 22 chief executives in New York City have bothered, and none apparently clocked more than a mere $235 an hour. “It is only as good as what people are contributing,” said James Holincheck, a research vice president at Gartner who follows the compensation industry. (Salary.com’s result was a bit more realistic: a range of $417,459 to $1,266,936.)

But the sites are meant for the average person, not titans of finance and industry.

“It’s like the Kelly Blue Book for compensation,” Mr. Giordano said. Like that reference manual for used-car prices, the salary sites give you a good idea of where to start the negotiations confidently.

Persuading the boss you need more money demands more than a report from an online service. You have to think about the kind of company that employs you. A start-up might pay lower salaries because employees have a chance to make a killing on options when it goes public or is sold. Some companies have a policy of high turnover, so raises are rarely in the offing.

Mr. Coleman suggests that people think about quality-of-life issues, as well as the money. For instance, sometimes it is easier for an employer to give an additional week of vacation rather than a 2 percent raise. A workweek condensed into four days might hold some value even though you will work no less — and probably will work more. “Money isn’t everything, but it isn’t nothing,” he said.

If you want more detailed information on multiple job offers in different regions, PayScale charges $20. Salary.com charges $30 to $100 for detailed reports depending on the level of the position.

Both sites offer advice and scores of ways to parse the information they have collected. Salary.com measures the salary of a stay-at-home mom. (The statisticians calculated that doing the housekeeping, cooking, babysitting, chauffeuring, administration and other jobs involved in staying at home with a preschooler in Chicago would probably take around 91 hours a week and be worth about $146,000.) Pay-Scale finds that based on the answers to a question it asks about commutes, for example, a store manager in Seattle gets to work 17 minutes faster than one in New York City. That has to be worth something.