When you go car shopping, what do you do? Do you get a quote from Ford on a F-150 and a separate quote from Honda on a Civic and then go with the lowest offer?

When you go laptop shopping, do you compare a 14.1″ laptop with a celeron processor and a 17″ laptop with a quad core processor? I sure hope not.

And when you are deciding between a savings accounts, do you only look at the interest rate despite all of the other factors?

Most likely in each of these cases you thought to yourself “Uh… no… what do I look like? An idiot?”

Salary Negotiations

However, when it comes time for salary negotiations people are fully prepared to just bite the bullet. They may go to a site like Payscale.com and see what other people in similar positions at different companies get paid. The industry might not even be the same but they wind up getting a range of what they are worth eventually. But this is like walking into the aforementioned Ford dealership and trying to negotiate the price of the F-150 down based on the Civic quote. Doesn’t work that way. This may be the number one greatest act of HR pulling the wool over its employees eyes! What reasons do they usually attribute this informal (sometimes formal) rule?

• Some employees may be sensitive about their pay
• Some employees may not be paid the same based on performance
• Some employees may not be paid the same based on one person negotiating more
• Some employees may not be paid the same based on degrees or certification
• etc.

To answer these point by point:

• If they are sensitive they don’t have to share.
• In the end, I think this reason shows an inability to manage people. If you are concerned with people finding out they are getting paid differently based on performance reasons then you are being counter productive. Someone getting a large raise should act as a reward for hard work. However, if the pay scale is not transparent how does one know if they are being rewarded or punished? The company may give low-performers a 3% raise but the naive employee may think he is on target or outperforming! Using this reason as a crutch to tell employees not to share salaries shows a pure lack of communication on the employers part. And that is not my responsibility to set expectations, it is theirs.
• So, you low balled me? Let me put it in other words… you did not want to pay me what I am worth. You expected me to take that money from you by negotiating back and forth. Got it.
• If the degree or certification makes them perform better, I understand. If not, then uhhh… what is the point?

My ideal solution would be that companies just make pay transparent. But, since that isn’t happening and discussing pay at the workplace in the meantime might be a death kiss to your career I have a better solution.

Glass Door

Glassdoor.com is a site that allows people to register and post reviews, ratings, and salary information for companies they previously worked for. In order to see this information you need to post a review or a salary. Users vote on the CEO for an approval rating and can research information on companies. You can feel comfortable using this site… the co-founder Robert Hohman also started expedia” target=”_self”>Expedia and Zillow. Surely we know both of those!

The reviews allow you to see what the person’s position was, what they rated the company overall, and then you can read their long review with pros and cons. Depending on the company you are researching you may find a lot of reviews or none at all (e.g. Deloitte has 387, Boston Consulting has 53, Aon Consulting has 9, and so on). Nonetheless, it is a good place to look!

Under the salaries tab, you get a similar layout. All of the salaries for different positions are laid out right in front of you. Depending on the company you may get more and  you may get less. I used Google just for fun.

Then by clicking on one of the actual positions it gets broken down even further…

Glassdoor.com is an excellent way to get inside information in regards to salary, work-life balance, employee treatment, employee satisfaction, benefits, bonuses, etc for companies you might want to work at.

Conclusion

This system isn’t changing anytime soon. HR will continue to tell us that we are not allowed to discuss salary “for our own good” and we will oblige. We will also research average salaries for similar positions thinking we are going into annual reviews armed with information! And they will continue to offer us less than we are worth and then get surprised when we ask for more… now that we have the real information from Glassdoor.com. Heads up to companies — Make your information transparent. It will take stress off of people during review time and also open up a dialogue for coaching. If someone is genuinely wondering why they are at the bottom of the scale they can be coached for improvement. And that is a win-win.

Has anyone here ever been jipped on an annual review? I am sure someone has… but I want to hear how bad and what you did to remedy it! Ever use Glassdoor to your advantage?