How well are you paid? How about the occupations you report on daily? How does a news subject’s compensation compare to others doing the same kind of work in your community? Salary.com will let you do an instant online comparison. Hey, maybe it will also give you the ammunition you need to ask for a pay raise.
The site is devoted to helping chart and compare salaries for all sorts of jobs – from accountants to warehouse workers, even sports columnists.
Some features are aimed mostly at human resource professionals, the people in personnel who do the hiring for employers. But there are also a number of helpful tools for journalists sniffing around for comparison numbers to enrich their reporting on particular industries or occupations.
The feature that is most usable is its “Salary Wizard,” an online searchable data base that lets you plug in the kind of job you’re interested in, a zip code or metropolitan area and, just like that, get back a detailed chart that shows you the average salaries being paid for that occupation. The people behind the site are employment consultants. They sell data to corporations and recruit information from local markets and use that data as a draw to their Web site.
