“What’s your desired salary?”
Ah, the compensation question—AKA the most-dreaded part of a job interview.
It used to be that for most of us, salaries were opaque. Maybe you could ask your very closest friend to share theirs, but the subject is still almost totally taboo. These days, though, we’re lucky to have an incredible amount of salary information at our fingertips—so we should definitely use it to our advantage.
The only downside to having so much information available to us is the possibility of feeling overwhelmed. After all, there are so many places to look, it can be hard to know where to start and what’s important. Fortunately, there is a process that you can use to evaluate your salary needs or job offers, no matter what company you’re considering. Let’s break that down.
3 Steps to Figure Out Your Market Value
Here’s a quick 3-step system you can use to identify an appropriate compensation range for any role.
- Brainstorm titles. First, come up with a list of a few job titles that roughly apply to you, then use a few reputable online tools to calculate a range. Look at how those ranges overlap to build a realistic estimate.
- Ground your numbers in a location. Look at cost of living in your target city, and adjust your range accordingly.
- Consider variables besides cash. Factor in things like specific benefits, holidays, and perks like flexible work options, or catered food at the office. Think about how much those are worth to you.
These steps should give you a solid salary range, plus a confident understanding of what’s normal in your field and what you can reasonably request. To help you gather the intel you need, here are some of the best sources of salary information on the web.
Where to Research
Glassdoor
Glassdoor is an indispensable source of info for figuring out your market rate, with a database of millions of data points about companies, culture, and salaries. You can use it to look at reviews and gain insight into the interview process at your target companies, salary ranges across many companies for a given role, and things about the work culture that HR will never tell you.
When it comes to salary ranges, Glassdoor employs a team of real people who manually validate the data on a regular basis, meaning that you can safely rely on it for relative accuracy. This is especially helpful when looking at larger companies, where you’re bound to find more data.
LinkedIn has reinvented itself in recent years as an explosively-growing professional networking community. It’s always been a source of job postings, but they’ve added some helpful features to applications and salary that you may want to use to help determine your market rate.
If you’re a “premium” user, when you click a job posting, you can scroll down to see insights like how many people have applied to the role through LinkedIn, how the skills listed on your profile match up with other applicants, and the estimated salary (when available), based on user-generated info. In my experience, some of these insights are useful, some of the time, but only when taken together with information from more robust salary tools.
The Salary Project™
The Salary Project™ by Career Contessa is a rapidly growing database of over 65,000+ user-submitted salaries, allowing you to slice and dice the info across industries, role types, and locations. A nice wrinkle of this database is that you can flag the top skills that you bring to your role, and then see what others using those skills are doing, and what they’re making. This isn’t as comprehensive for targeting specific companies as some of the other sites, but it's very useful for anyone considering a career or industry shift, and looking for ways that their strongest skills could help them level up.
Comparably
Comparably launched in 2016 as a tech-industry-focused competitor to sites like Glassdoor. Their UX is easy and friendly to use, and you only have to fill out one field (a job title) to get instant information about compensation for that role.
What makes Comparably different is their focus on studying the intangible things about work with survey questions like, “How’s the work-life balance at your company?” They’ve collected thousands of answers, and you can view the results in breakdowns by gender, ethnicity, industry, and more.
Payscale
In internet terms, PayScale is the grandmother of pretty much all salary and data websites. Founded in 2002, PayScale has helped millions of employees understand their worth in an ever-changing job market. PayScale's Salary Calculator uses Job Titles and Locations to access real-time salaries for thousands of different careers.
In addition to their tools, PayScale hosts a ton of helpful content around career research, job industries, marketable job skills, and much more.
Quora
Quora is a question-and-answer forum, where an engaged community of users discuss questions ranging from professional to extremely personal. The real value here is in the deep discussions of different firms, especially tech companies.
Try using the search feature to look for the company you’re targeting or going to interview at next week, with a search like “[Company] salaries” or “[Company] culture” and see what comes up. Beyond salary and benefits information, I also love to use Quora to get the scoop on companies that I might work with as a customer or partner.
The Buffer Transparent Salary Calculator
Back in 2013, social media software company Buffer did something rather astonishing: in the name of “radical transparency,” they published the salaries of their entire team, along with the exact formula they use for calculating salaries.
If you’re interested in technology roles or roles at a software company, you’ll definitely want to read about this and run through their calculator for yourself. Will the Buffer formula apply to everyone or every company? No, it won’t. But, it’s an awesome way to see how one successful and competitive company determines salary.
Wolfram|Alpha: Cost of Living Calculator
One thing to note about Buffer’s formula is that it requires you to put in a multiplier for “cost of living” in your location. That’s something you should be taking into account no matter what, since salaries vary greatly depending on where the job is located. My favorite way to calculate the cost of living is with Wolfram|Alpha’s Cost of Living indices.
Using their free tools, you can find out not just the cost of living in a particular city, but also the change in cost from one city to another, and the breakdown in average costs for things like food, housing, and more. This is an incredibly valuable tool for evaluating job offers that would require you to relocate, or just for planning your future.
Putting it Together
Figuring out your market value and negotiating your salary is stressful for everyone, but it’s a task you can’t ignore if you want to get the salary you deserve. Now that you’re armed with a list of the best places online to get detailed compensation data for free, all that’s missing is a little focused digging. Put in the time to understand your industry and local market and research positions like yours, and you can go into your new interview or negotiation feeling calm and confident.
