Interest Conflict In The Salary Sharing Space
I've discussed this topic before, but feel the need to revisit it now. Many salary and career sites profess to focusing their services on the needs of a person's career. However, based on their own admissions in their About Us pages, one can learn a great deal about whom each company serves. Over the next several days, I will highlight a few of the players and see where they stand.
Let's start with the juggernaut: Salary.com
From their About Us section:
7,000 Corporate Subscribers | 10,000,000 Employees
Salary.com builds on-demand software around a deep domain knowledge in the area of compensation to help customers win the war for talent by simplifying the connections between people, pay and performance. Salary.com's cutting edge technology is integrated with actionable data and content, empowering customers to make the best decisions about pay and performance and help them to attract, motivate, reward and retain top performers.
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Who are Salary.com's customers? Judging by their pride in the 7,000 corporate subscribers they've accumulated and the content of the very first paragraph, it's clear that Salary.com values the corporate customer more than their 10 million "employees".
Let's examine that term closely. Salary.com calls the people who give them information on their salaries "employees". Wow. Don't employees get paid by their employers? The people who contribute their salary information to Salary.com presumably do so in order to receive a free salary report. The problem is that the data in those free reports are marginally beneficial (one only gets actionable data by paying fairly hefty subscriber or report fees).
It seems that consumers are essentially VOLUNTEERS for Salary.com because the company is monetizing our data without paying us anything. If the currency that we as contributors to Salary.com should be paid in is information, then Salary.com shouldn't charge anyone for the best data. It should be given away. I find this corporate behavior bordering on unconscionable.