How can I get salary data?
Karen Choper: There a number of places that you can find information on salary, one you can ask people who are on the field. They generally have a pretty good idea of what the ballpark is and so you can just ask them what they should be looking for this particular position. You can look at want ads that are posted online, some of them will have salaries listed in the want ads and that will help you get a ballpark.
There are also salary survey’s that are available but normally they are quite costly, so be very careful before you choose to pay for salary information. You can also use online tech groups or list serves and sometimes you can throw out a question saying, “You know what’s the salary range for this particular position?” and you will get some data there.
Often times the company doesn’t list the salary for the job that they’re posting and so you’re not going to get any information from the company whatsoever officially but if you’ve got good, networking contacts and cat get to somebody inside the company. They can often give you a pretty good idea of what the position is going to pay.
Finally, if you’re working for a non-profit or looking to work for a non-profit organization, you can get a ballpark of what you might be expecting in this position simply by looking at their 990. The 990 is their tax return and for non-profit organizations, it has to be made public, so you can find this on the web and the 990 will list the top five salaries within the corporation. And what that tells you is if the executive director is making a $150,000.00 then it’s possible that you might be able to get $90,000.00 or an $110,000.00 for a VP position.
But if the executive director is only making $90,000.00 then you can expect that your position is going to pay significantly less than that and so for non profits that’s a good way of getting a sense of what the ball park is going to be for your position.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services