Looking through Glassdoor Darkly

Businessweek looks at a new startup, Glassdoor.com, here. The company has an impressive pedigree and a nice looking site, but we think these types of “review your teacher/company/cafe” products provide anecdotal but not really actionable data. Fine for selecting a muffin but less useful for negotiating a salary. The use of self-reported survey data is an established protocol for putting together survey reports. But it’s used to make the process of collecting information easier so that more data can be collected. It is well known that self-reported self-selected survey data is much less reliable but if you collect enough of it, it becomes somewhat statistically meaningful. In the case of glassdoor, the salary data is self-reported from a single company and the data sets per job title are small, it’s fun, anecdotal info but hardly actionable. Knowing what 6 project managers at Google earn, tells one just about nothing about what kind of salary they can expect. Having hired many project managers at many different salary levels, there are so many different variables we looked at to determine a fair offer that knowing what 6 anonymous individuals say they earn wouldn’t be convincing. With our salarytrack.co.uk tool, we look at millions of data points so that we can provide granularity and actionable salary data - and we’re still hungry for more data just to improve our results. Our SalaryTrack looks at data for current offers of employment. Unlike survey reports which use historical data, we only display data from current UK job postings.
Data is completely customizable allowing for searches based on any job title, skill, and location. Salary median averages are provided with distribution and percentile charts allowing you to view the salary spread. Additional breakdowns provide an instant view of salaries across the UK regions, and industry sectors. I really enjoy a good gossip site (valleywag), and often use products like tripadvisor to help select a hotel, and so I think glassdoor could very well become successful but it will not replace a more professional approach to providing salary data.
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