Payscale: Where is your career going?

Payscale collects and aggregates job and salary information via its website. It then sells this information to HR departments in companies for compensation evaluation. Payscale entices people with the promise of letting them know how much they are over or under paid. I've known people who have used this data to their advantage while negotiating salary.

To be a part of the job survey you have to fill out a survey with a number of questions concerning your current job, job history, quality of living, and employer. If you have an account then your profile will be saved. You can then see how much other people are making in other locations, other fields. You can also runs what-if scenarios to see how potential careers might pay-off.

Today they are launching GigZig. It's a new feature that helps you examine a career path. To use it, just enter a job title (you'll need to match one that's already in their system).

You'll then be presented with a set of jobs that people with your current job used to have and what people who had your job go to in the future. All of the salary data is in today's dollars. The number of gold people shown next to a job in a path indicate how many people have gone that route (3 represents 20% of the people have followed this path). You can test your results in the US, Canadian, UK, Australian and Indian job markets.

Payscale reported to me that they get 1.8M uniques a month (this is a lot more than what Compete reports). These visitors are viewing data aggregated from over 7 million profiles (they expect to be at 10 Million by the end of the year). They sell salary reports via 1000+ subscriptions and compete against Salary.com and ERI in this market. They share samples of this data in their Research Center.

I think Payscale has moved into a lucrative business in a smart way. By getting people to enter their salary and job information they get more information faster (and cheaper) than their less web-enabled competitors. It also enables them to discover and collect data about new jobs before the jobtype really hits mainstream (see after the jump what Gigzig makes of "blogger"). Adding more consumer features to pull people in will only increase their traffic and thus increase the value of their data set.

I was amused by this unintentional, but blazingly accurate commentary on blogging. :-)