Why You Shouldn’t Rely on Glassdoor Salary Estimates
A resource for anyone interested in salary in a new office is Glassdoor, given that the site is teeming with crowdsourced salaries for various positions in literally thousands of companies. If you take Glassdoor’s salary at face value, then you have a pretty decent idea of how much this purported job might be paying. Right?
Maybe not. Since Glassdoor’s payroll data is collected through a combination of employee self-reported pay and artificial intelligence algorithms that look at millions of data points, there is a big caveat over most, if not all, payrolls presented on the website. (On more rare occasions, companies offer wage ranges themselves, although this information is usually heavily guarded.)
But without a large, trusted brand to consult with, how can you research how much you can expect to get paid for a newly found and attractive job? There are other tools out there, and just because they don’t have the sleek interface of a well-funded tech site doesn’t mean they’re not worth your time.
How does Glassdoor salary work?
As stated earlier, Glassdoor operates on an honor system. This means that former and / or current employees offer salaries of their own accord. This does not mean that these employees lied, or that the figures reported by the people themselves are inaccurate. But salaries that were accurate at the time of writing may have changed dramatically by the time you started your research.
Using Glassdoor in machine learning to generate the large salary ranges for different jobs that you see below the listings also makes it difficult to truly understand the results. The company is quite outspoken about this, writing in its FAQ section:
Glassdoor also wants to remind you that salary estimates are estimates. They do not represent guarantees of real wages and are not necessarily approved by employers. The purpose of salary assessments is to use predictive data to provide job seekers with a likely salary range so they can make more informed job decisions and to help employers hire informed and quality candidates. For this reason, Glassdoor does not guarantee the accuracy of the estimates.
Salaries change all the time
Moreover, since the sharing of salary information is still taboo in the US and companies are not enthusiastic about its public offering, companies rarely post their information on Glassdoor. When they do, you will notice, because when “employers provide salary information, Glassdoor displays” Employer Score . “ about vacancies, ”the company said in a statement .
Salaries are constantly changing due to inflation, and the one registered salary you are viewing may be lower (or higher) than the one you are willing to receive, as location is a huge factor in calculating your salary. Someone in Davenport, Iowa, won’t be paid as much as a colleague doing the same job in Chicago, for example, due to the higher cost of living in a big city.
Moreover, salaries can vary greatly within one position. Sometimes people stay in the same job for several years without getting a promotion but still get a pay raise, be it merit or an annual company raise. Job titles are also often misleading, meaning that two people with the same title in different companies can have very different roles and salary levels.
As Rush Recruiting and HR explains :
On paper, colleagues may have the same role, but that doesn’t mean they actually have the same job. Companies may use general terms such as “marketing manager” or “senior marketing strategist,” but different seniority may be applied to these positions in their hierarchy.
One tip: in larger companies, payroll lists are often a little more accurate. The more employees, the higher the level of crowdsourcing, not to mention consistency across the board.
Alternatives to using Glassdoor
It never hurts to ask people who have worked or are still working for the company you want to apply for. Talking about money is important when it comes to finding a job and creating a morale-building job, and many workers – whether they are acquaintances or friends – are likely to be happy to share salary information with you.
Alternatively, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics can be a good resource. Take it for what it is – a giant government data repository – and move from there. BLS uses data collected by employers who are required by law to accurately report their numbers. While this is sort of a generalized view of what certain employees do by industry, it’s definitely useful.
You will have to search in your industry, but you can get some pretty specific information . For example, see the Bureau’s average salary for Museum and Historic Site employees .
There are other websites like Salary.com and Payscale that basically do the same thing as Glassdoor. Payscale allows you to navigate according to the job title, industry and degree you may have, in addition to other criteria. While no online database will give you an accurate idea of potential salary, using a number of these tools in tandem with any word of mouth information you can gather should give you a rough idea of what to expect.