A Salary Calculator is a very useful tool for going into a negotiation but there are definitely a lot of pro’s and con’s with leaning too heavily on what you learn from a salary calculator.
Pros:
1. Salary Calculators are an easy way to get a quick datapoint on what you should be earning. They can be fast and easy to get access to (often free).
2. Lots of smaller companies that don’t have access to more expensive data or don’t have comparable hires to you will rely heavily on salary calculators. Although you may disagree with the number that they are thinking about, it is vital to know what they are thinking.
Cons:
1. Salary Calculators are based upon survey data in order to figure out the industry averages. Depending upon the depth of the research, the averages can often ignore a lot of the smaller companies. It is much harder to get data on companies with less than 100 employees (they often don’t report their data and the data can be harder to find). This means that salary calculators are not always based upon data that is appropriate for the company that you are talking to.
2. Salary Calculators are usually only based upon titles and years spent at a job. Often companies will inflate or deflate titles to make up for lower or higher salaries. We all know that an assistant manager position at a Fortune 500 company is a lot different from an assistant manager position at a two-year old startup. Salary calculators can lump all of this together and not necessarily give you the information that you need.
3. Salary calculators can be difficult to us in negotiations because there are so many of them out there and other than the summary data, you usually cannot get access to the underlying data or a sense of how accurate it can be. The other person across the table from you could have a different salary calculator based upon a different set of data as well.
You should definitely look for a salary calculator as another data point, but you still need to do the additional homework in order to figure out what benchmarks are most appropriate for your personal situation. Your goal is to walk into a negotiation with appropriate salary information that represents you. With that kind of information, you will have a lot easier time getting what YOU deserve.