salary surveys

As many of you are going through the recruiting process now I felt I should address one of the many questions I get:

what is the typical salary range for a given position?

Now, of course, because we are the little guy we don’t have access to current salary surveys (they cost a fortune) but we do have access to the internet where you will find Salary.com and in particular the Salary Wizard.  This is a great little free online tool to help you determine salary ranges for given roles to see if you are offering market rates or not (or to see if you, as the individual, are reasonable in your salary expectations).

Now, to be clear, this is just to provide another data point to see if you are in the ballpark not to give you actual salary data for a particular position.  I say this because: (a) it is based on key cities in the US and as you know salary’s for the same role can differ based on geography due to local cost of living but also (b) it doesn’t take into consideration the size of the company. 

To illustrate its limitations I will provide an example. I am a CFO in Vancouver, BC working for small tech companies of less than 50 people.  When you use the Salary Wizard and type in keyword = CFO and State/Metro = Seattle, WA (my closest US city) it returns a salary range of US$269K - $451K.  Uhm, ya, that would be nice.  Hah! 

But for standard roles it works a bit better.  When I type keyword = Software Developer and State/Metro = Seattle, WA it first returns various software developer roles (senior, junior, web developer) and when I click through to a software developer it returns US57K - $70K which is about right.  Small companies typically pay between 60-80K for software developers.

So, just another data point.  If nothing else it’s fun to see what someone else thinks you’re worth.