The E-Way to Negotiate Your Salary
Research your way into a raise by using data from a
Web site to negotiate your pay.
By Dana Greenlee, Co-Host WebTalkGuys Radio
What’s the biggest subject of gossip and stress on the job? It’s
when you’re standing around the water cooler and talking about who makes what salary
- and then somehow you end up feeling ripped off or embarrassed, depending if you make
more or less than your co-workers.
There’s a way to avoid this. You can research your way into getting the raise you
deserve by backing up your request with hard data found at Salary.com, which is probably
the most popular provider of salary comparisons information on the web.
You can find out what you're worth in your occupation, and then scroll through the career
and recruitment articles job advice and career planning tips.
 Salary.com’s
Senior Vice President Tim Driver advises to spend time staying current as salary trends
evolve and do your homework before I accepting a job offer. Driver explains the tools you
can use to do just that.
Listen to the audio interview:
12 min @ 20K Stream.
 Real WinMedia
Q: How is Salary.com filling
a need?
Driver: We’re seeking to answer that fundamental question:
“What am I worth?” People didn’t have obvious places to go for this
sensitive information, other than friends and colleagues. This is the place to go to get
trusted, reliable information on salaries in many marketplaces.
Q: How does your Salary Wizard work?
Driver: We have a Salary Wizard that basically allows people to come to
Salary.com to find out what they’re worth. It’s very simple. They fill in what
their location is, what their job category and title is. Then presto - within seconds they
have a pay range for what they ought to be paid based on their industry and what
we’re told by Human Resource professionals.
Q: This covers the full spectrum of jobs? Not just technology workers?
Driver: That’s right. We have 1,000 jobs in a very broad spectrum.
Q: What type of industry tends to use the Salary Wizard?
Driver: Tech jobs are very popular. People really want to learn what
their market value is. The same way when you research how much to pay for a car when you
want to know what the value of that car is. When you sell your services to a company, what
is that worth? What is everyone else being paid? What would you be paid if you were doing
the same job in another city?
Q: A lot of salaries for tech workers have declined. Is there a higher
expectation with some tech workers for what their compensated might be?
Driver: Yes, the information has changed significantly over the coarse of
last year. Compensation analysts update our salary data monthly.
Q: Tell us about other services Salary.com offers to help support
achieving a proper compensation?
Driver: One of the most popular things to do on Salary.com is not only to
find out the pay range you’re worth, but also to dig even deeper. We offer the basic
service for free. And then you can drill down and get a Personal Salary Report for a small
cost. You can find out your market value tailored to your location, company size, your
years of experience, how many you supervise, and where you went to school. Then you have a
more refined point to negotiate with your current or new employer. This pays huge
dividends. People tell us all the time about the enormous value of this information in
getting them pay increases.
Q: You’re responsible for creating the Salary Timer and Millionaire
Maker. Tell us what these do?
Driver: These are more entertaining kinds of applications. The Salary
Timer lets you compare your own salary - on a second by second basis - with the salary of
a celebrity or a CEO. Just click a button and it will click away and will tell you, say,
after 10 seconds, you’ve earned .97 cents and Michael Jordan has earned $97,000.
The Millionaire Maker tells you what age you’ll become a millionaire. For some
people, they’ll be happy to see it will happen when they turn 65. For others, they
may become a millionaire at 143!
WTG
(Dana Greenlee is president of LoudVox.com and
co-host of the WebTalkGuys Radio Show. WebTalkGuys, a Washington-based talk show featuring
technology news and interviews. It is broadcast on CNET Radio in San Francisco and Boston,
on the web at CNET Radio, WebTalkGuys Radio and via the XM satellite network and on NexTel's
Wireless Web. Past show and interviews are also webcast via the Internet at http://www.webtalkguys.com). |
