Announcing the StrategicPay Series!

Today, Applied HR Strategies is announcing the publication of the first of several planned "hands on" guidebooks to help business, HR and even compensation professionals to be able to "do it yourself" ("DIY") on compensation development projects that are normally hired out to compensation consultants, at many times the cost of the Series modules (we call then toolkits).

The StrategicPay™ Series was created for HR, compensation and business professionals that want to have technically sound and professional compensation programs, but who can't afford (or don't want to afford) the high cost of hiring outside compensation consultants. It's also designed to help HR and compensation professionals learn and grow professionally in strategic areas of compensation planning and program development.

Also, effective immediately, the StrategicPay Series website will also be the home of our main blog. We will continue to periodically post compensation and HR stories directly related to the Pacific Northwest here, but for our main blog, visit us here.

Another Comp Professional's View on Glassdoor.com

I just received this quote from a compensation analyst colleague and client of ours. I thought it was worth passing along (with permission):

"I already have looked at glass door and found how easy it was to put in false data (I started filling out a false report myself and stopped just short of saying “submit”). There apparently is nothing stopping me from saying that I work anywhere I want at whatever job title and job salary I care to enter. I can enter past or “current” information."

"I feel the same way you do and other comp professionals. Unfortunately, most employees look at this stuff like it is the gospel which makes it as difficult as heck to get them to believe the real survey information."

Glassdoor.com Offers Yet Another Source of Pay Data for the Masses

Doesn’t the world already have enough unverified and/or less methodologically rigorous sources of pay data for the masses? Apparently, the newly-unveiled glassdoor.com doesn’t think so.

We already have vault.com, salary.com, payscale.com and others to provide data-thirsty workers ammunition to “verify” their under-compensated belief systems and to complain to their employers with (of course, if the “data” shows them “fairly” compensated, then no one ever hears about that!). Vault.com, for instance, has been supplying employer pay data “intelligence” for about a decade already.

Glassdoor.com is brought to you by the some of the same folks that founded zillow.com, a truly revolutionary and “disruptive” technology venture that blew the lid off real-estate valuation. Zillow isn’t perfect either, but at least they use real and verified data (publicly available real estate sale and tax records).

Is glassdoor.com the same revolutionary or disruptive technology as zillow.com? This compensation consultant certainly doesn’t thinks so, unless I’m missing something (it wouldn’t be the first time!). Self-depreciating humor aside, collecting anonymous incumbent-supplied data and presenting it as accurate and statistically-relevant/representative data isn’t new, and it isn’t valid either.

I won’t bore you with my long-winded recitation on why real compensation professionals rarely ever use these data sources. Let’s just say that most compensation professionals tend to want more methodologically-sound data sources than websites that offer incumbent-supplied data and/or “proprietary” (i.e. secret) data sources or methodologies.

OK, I’m getting off my soapbox now…