The TechCrunch 7 party was quite a blast–I met a bunch of people, all of who are doing interesting things online. During the course of the evening, I chatted with the founder of WageExchange. Their goal is to even the playing field in the job market by gathering salary information from employees around the US, and anonymously divulging the data for all to see.

There’s already many salary information sources online from survey companies. However, WageExchange is the only one that I know of that exposes the raw salary data. Other companies only provide aggregate data such as medians, averages, and standard deviations. Aggregate data is informative, but it also means that you’re at the mercy of how the companies decide to slice the data. With WageExchange, you can slice and dice however you want (as long as you have the skill to do so offline).

So what is the benefit of raw wage data? WaveExchange’s tag line is “it’s rude to ask, but you want to know.” A well-informed employee will have more bargaining power when it comes time for performance reviews. WageExchange’s founder shared a story with me about a group of accountants who collected all their pay stubs, and discovered that they were underpaid. They approached the board of directors with the pay stubs and statistics in tow, and got the raises they deserved. The directors just couldn’t argue with the hard numbers. This was the inspiration for WageExchange.

In order to get access to the wage data, you must first fill in a salary survey. It’s a pretty typical survey that asks for your job title, industry, salary, bonuses, working hours, and other relevant information. After finishing, you can leisurely peruse and search others’ salary information. The design of the interface won’t win any awards, but it’s functional and gets the job done.

Right now, there’s about 600 survey items that have been filled out. WageExchange is looking to expand, which will make their database that much more valuable. A feature that I would like to see is the ability to provide aggregate data alongside the raw data. Various drop down boxes would allow the user to slice the salary data along various dimensions like industry and job title. Also, the ability to export the data to a spreadsheet would be nice for us information addicts out there.

Overall, WageExchange’s goal is a noble one: helping employees discover their value in the market. Go fill out a survey, and see if you’re the one being underpaid.

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Categories - Wage Exchange, Surveys, Jobs, Money |