Know Your Worth: Pricing Information You Can Depend On

Do you know what you should be paid at your job? I mean, do you REALLY know? Maybe you’ve received consistent raises and cost-of-living adjustments for a decade. But if your salary wasn’t competitive at the beginning, your salary could be way off the market rate now – especially if you’ve never truly benchmarked your job and negotiated for market adjustments.

To know your worth, many turn to employee-reported (or “crowdsourced”) compensation data. But for compensation experts, these tools don’t offer the most reliable data. Employer-reported pay data, which is collected from corporate HR departments worldwide, is widely considered the gold standard for understanding the true market value of the jobs in your organization. HR-reported market data offers unparalleled job matching, pricing, and reporting accuracy that simply can’t be matched by employee-reported data.

In the article, the follow questions will be answered:

• Why is it important to know my worth?
• What is the difference between self-reported and HR-reported salaries?
• What is the best way to determine your value on the job market?
• Why is salary.com the best resource to get a Know Your Worth quote?

Concerns About Employee-Reported Salary Data

When media outlets write about salary data, they often lump organizations like Salary.com, LinkedIn, Paysa, Payscale, Glassdoor, and others together. Yet only Salary.com uses HR-reported aggregate market pay data and employer-reported compensation survey data to build a view of your worth.

Here’s an example: let’s say you’re are a Human Resources Director in Boston, Massachusetts with 20 years of experience. Do you know what you are worth?

When pricing your job on many of the leading career and pay sites, you’re pricing against pay data that’s been submitted by other users of the site. This is because many of the leading sites require you to enter more than half a dozen pages of personal data, including your annual base salary, benefits, company name, skills, and more, before you can see what others are being paid. You’re also required to find a job match for your job – often based on title alone.

If you merely want to access the answers, you might just enter “$100,000” as salary, whether that is an accurate answer or not. Or, you might try to answer more thoughtfully, but not know the exact value of your incentive or benefits packages. You might also struggle to find an exact match for your job title based on the titles in the site’s database.

With self-reported data, the information you entered into this survey, whether real or bogus, is blended with the rest. Next time a Human Resource Director assesses their worth in salary, your data will be included in the analysis, unless it’s a dramatic outlier.

In comparison, HR-reported salary survey data is collected directly from compensation professionals who set the pay ranges for their companies. They follow a lengthy job matching process, which requires them to match their internal company jobs to their salary survey providers’ jobs, using a detailed set of match criteria like job title, job description, key job duties and skills, required years of experience, and other job levelling information.

Once they’ve established a job match, they submit similar categories of information – base salary, long- and short-term incentive pay, benefits, and more – for each of the employees in each of their jobs. These massive files are then collected by the survey providers, who aggregate, anonymize, and run accuracy analyses against the data. They also ensure that the data maintains Safe Harbor compliance with federal government anti-trust regulations.

In contrast to employee-reported (or “crowdsourced”) data sites, the data reported on Salary.com is only derived from HR-reported data sources, including hundreds of traditional salary surveys that follow the process described above. Because companies rely on this data to market price and set pay for their jobs, they take the process of participating in surveys very seriously and often spend countless hours job matching and participating in such surveys ever year.

The data collected through these processes is also submitted to a rigorous quality assurance check by the survey providers, which often involves digging in with individual participants about data outliers. HR-reported data is therefore widely viewed as the most credible and accurate source of pay data available.

HR-Reported Market Data to the Rescue

To demonstrate the difference between employee-reported and HR-reported data, consider the prices offered by many of the top sites for similar roles.

For example, one of the employee-reported (or “crowdsourced”) data sites reports a median range for your Human Resources Director role at just under $107,000. The same search for an HR Director pay on Salary.com’s Salary Wizard reports a Human Resource Director in Boston, Massachusetts with 20 years of experience should earn a median income of $173,129. This is a 62% discrepancy!