In Search Of A Savory Salary

[This post is written and copyrighted by FIRE Finance (http://firefinance.blogspot.com).]

Nov 19, 2009: We spend more than one third of our lives at our work places. Perhaps its a good idea to make sure that we are being paid well for our sweat and toil. But how do we go about finding out how much our salaries should be?

Well in this age of technology, smart people should use good tools to accomplish the job. One of the finest tools for salary search has been released by a company named Indeed. Playing around with the tool, we discovered quite a few neat features and interesting facts:

• We can compare more than one Job Title, in various cities and states by using the "Add Comparison" link below the "What" and "Where" boxes.

• If we want to remove some of the criteria chosen above for comparison we can do so by using the button "Remove" placed at the end of each row.

So how does Indeed's Salary Search Do It?

A quote from their website:

Indeed Salary Search is based on an index of salary information extracted from over 50 million job postings from thousands of unique sources over the last 12 months. Many job descriptions don't contain salary information, but there are enough that do to produce statistically significant average salaries for millions of keyword, job title and location combinations - in fact, most job searches you are likely to think of. As new jobs are added each day, the Indeed Salary Search index is automatically updated with fresh salary data, so the salary results are as up-to-date as they could possibly be.

What is so unique about Indeed's Salary Search?

Indeed claims that Salary Search isn't based on survey data and isn't limited to job titles. They say that:

• Market Rate: Many salary tools that claim to be market-based use historic survey data. But is the past a true reflection of the current market rate? Indeed Salary Search shows you what current job openings are paying - which is what matters if you are in the job market. Traditional survey-based salary tools can be poor at tracking completely new kinds of job - Iraq Reconstruction Program Advisor, for example - whereas Indeed monitors the very latest jobs as they emerge.

• Keyword-based: Typical salary tools are based on job titles alone, but Indeed Salary Search lets you search using any mix of skills, keywords or job titles to give you the average salary of all jobs matching your query. You don't have to choose a generic job title that may or may not match your skill set, which really helps when skills or qualifications are more important than titles. Indeed Salary Search also provides the average salaries of jobs with specific titles related to your search.

Well, we did like the concepts behind Indeed's tool. The authenticity of its data can be checked wrt a particular industry and location by comparing the current salaries in that domain with the data generated by Salary Search. If any of our readers do find out how well this tool fares against real life data, please do let us know. Meanwhile we shall also try to find out how well the tool fares in our professional arenas. Good salaries are rare indeed!

Image Source(s): iStockPhoto

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