Hey fellow Hunters, it's Jason the co-founder of Comparably :)
We're really excited about Comparably for Companies, our new product to publicly highlight the real cultures at Tech Companies. We’ve built this platform to give all employees a simple and fast way to leave a thorough and anonymous review of their company through structured data.
Today, we're excited to introduce hundreds of company profiles with tens of thousands live, verified employee ratings. You can see how the employee ratings break out by Gender, Ethnicity, Department and Tenure.
In addition we've built an amazing equity calculator to help individuals better understand what type of equity compensation is typically expected for various jobs. We’ve also massively expanded the number of cities in our database and job titles in tech, so you can see what people with your jobs are getting paid in salary & equity.
At Comparably, our mission is to Make Work Better, by making compensation and culture dramatically more transparent. Please let us know your feedback and what we can do to make the product even better going forward. Thanks so much for trying it out :)
Jason Nazar, CEO/co-founder Comparably
@jasonnazar How do you ensure no revenge reviews of former employees?
Regarding recent insights, the salary and compensation is amongst the weakest decision influencers on the job market and also displays a very a weak link with happiness. Exposing your office neighbours salary might just lead to jealousy and thus to immediate pay raise demands and a subsequently crippled working environment.
As you can be sure that salaries are not homogenous based on something as vague and meaningless as job titles and roles. Especially, regarding today's startups organisational governance systems usually should and do not compensate based upon a rigid role description, but rather on potential outcome influence, product importance, work environment influence, and many more individual variables one can hardly capture. The job title is just pro forma - there needs to be something categorizable for accounting.
The ability to negotiate is also a very necessary and valuable skill in the free market. In other words, if my colleague who does the same like me, but is the better conversationalist and thus got more equity out of his deal, then he deserves it as he obviously does something better than me. Do I deserve to know it? Do I deserve to demand a claim on what he earned by negotiation skills?
If we are robots - I'd say yes. Otherwise...
@andmitsch Andreas really thoughtful points. I'll try and address them all :)
1) We build the platform around structured data primarily so the loudest most intense voices couldn't overtake the whole experience. When you have 500 out of 1000 employees leaving the ratings, no one person out for revenge can skew the ratings. I think written reviews are more biased towards revenge postings. (not to say they aren't really valuable as well)
2) I agree that salaries based on job titles alone are misleading as there as so many other factors that go into why that person is paid what they are. That's why we let people see salaries by over a dozen dimensions including work experience, time at company, gender, ethnicity, education, location, company size, money raised, etc... (we'll soon be adding skills ...:). Is this a perfect way to quantify an individuals value, no. But we believe it's a really valuable way to understand your market value of people as similar to you in as similar professional situations.
3.) I completely agree that any (fair) deal an employer and employee strike is what the value of the role is, and if someone has stronger communications skills to get that compensation they deserve it. The question is, doesn't everyone benefit overtime, both Employee and Employer by having more transparency around both compensation and culture. Everything in my experience has told me yes so far. Now we are not taking it as far as Buffer and saying individual peoples comp needs to be make public, that's a decision for each company and their team. But understanding the bound of the market, and knowing more about the culture of a company, should create more engaged team members with a greater sense of ownership.
@jasonnazar
#1 - agree, this however, requires a certain sample size to devalue the outliers that might skew the picture, but is that even necessary? Shouldn't those negative outliers be addressed publicly by the persons who feel responsible i.e. the coworkers fo the negative feedback? Though, I can't remember, but didn't glassdoor once start with no moderation functions? Thus to let the mass and market form the brand's reputation. I mean today, there is moderation everywhere on glassdoor.
#2 - Sounds good. A huge set of quantifiable variables can prevent this "jealousy" issue I thought of. But on the other hand, this requires a lot of autonomous effort from the user to nourish your database. What do they get as gratification for their effort? Just the moral satisfaction?
#3 - I am not sure about this. I believe in a self-regulating working environment and corporate social culture, a constant collaborative conversation so to say. If the mental leaders, whoever that may be, do not live openness, I am not sure if an external platform should supply that or even can. There is definitely a lot of content material available for you focusing on educational content to this matter - this might be a great customer demand generation lever.
@rrhoover Thanks Ryan. 2 Things we have been surprised about: 1) It's REALLY fascinating to see how the data breaks down by department. Its interesting to see how Design vs Engineering vs Marketing perceives their company. You can quickly tell how the company skews, whether its more focused on product/engineers or marketing/sales. We hope this is a really valuable tool for people overtime in understanding the specifics of a culture of a company.
2) Company reviews have often in the past been dominated by the outliers, either the most angry of employees looking for a public forum to trash their company or folks often asked by their manager to leave glowing reviews. The net effect is that you get feedback from a small percent in either case of the employee base. We're finding that by having a simple 15 question flow that can be answered in less than a minute, employees that would have otherwise not left a review are participating. We hope this is really powerful overtime by bringing more people into the process of publicly talking about their companies that otherwise would be the case.
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