How Much Should I Get Paid?

Increasingly, employees want to make sure that they work on a good team, and on the winning team. It's not enough to get a great job title, a fancy office and a big salary.

Good people need to work with good people. Success breeds success.

Personally, I believe in really working hard on getting the right people on board. If you recruit well, everything else follows. However, it's not just about you finding a person to do the job well. The best candidates need to find a company and team that they really want to join. It's a marriage every time you hire. If done well, the divorce rate is low (few people leave).

So, I was very interested to see a website that is helping prospective employees find out about prospective employers. It's called glassdoor.com.

Sign up to the site and you can rate your current and previous employers. You can also find out salary ranges for each company by job type. The catch? To read reviews or to see salaries, you need to add a review or leave your salary details.

If this takes off, we could have a free, easy to access salary benchmarking service. Working out whether you get paid the market rate becomes easier and easier. HR teams will have a cheaper source of compensation data for benchmarking. Asking for a pay rise though will still be nerve racking.

I'm cautious. I certainly won't be posting my current salary or giving feedback on my current company, mainly because there's only one of me (COO) and so it'd be pretty obvious who left the comments. I would probably leave comments on previous employers though, given that the risk of getting into a comprimising situation is lower.

It's defintely one to watch. I think it will take off in the UK simply because we're so nosy about each other.

In the long term it could change the job market in that workers will have a totally transparent view of what it is like to work for a company before joining them. That can only be a good thing: employers will create a reputation by actually being an effective organisation, not by marketing HR hype.