Salary Guides

How do you know what salary you should expect for either your current job or a job you might apply for?

A good way to go is to find salary review guides and industry reports from recruitment agencies and job listing platforms which, for the small cost of filling in a short lead collection form, provide a macro view of industry and salary trends.

The ones I regularly refer to are:

• Talent International Salary Search
• Hays Salary Guide
  • Hays Salary Guide FY24/25
  • Hays Salary Guide IT Edition FY23/24
• Absolute IT Industry Reports
  • Abosolut IT Job Market & Salary Report 2024

These are additional sites with salary information which I have not used to the same extent but may be worth looking at

• Seek - Compare your Salary with Market Trends
• Hays Salary Checker
• PayScale

A note on Glassdoor #

Glassdoor is a platform for anonymously posting your salary and rating and reviewing of employer. You may be able to use some basic features without providing any of your own information but eventually you will be asked to create an account and contribute your own salary data to keep using the platform. Fair is fair I guess.

The platform is supposed to keep your personal information and posts anonymous from employers and other users of the platform but be warned that Glassdoor may deanonymise users without their consent

Apply common sense and don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your mother (or your current or future employer) to read.

There’s a lot more to say about Glassdoor but I’ll leave that for another post.

Some other things to consider #

• Different reports break down salary ranges and data in different ways such as the summary statistics they use or breaking down by experience level, or include different roles. For this reason it’s good to cross reference several reports to get a bigger picture.

• Reports that contain salary ranges that are not broken down by level of experience such as “Full Stack Developer 65k - $150k” normally encompass salaries for a broad range of experience from graduate to veteran. Its worthwhile seeking out supplementary sources for a breakdown of salaries by level of experience.

• Salary ranges vary by city and country. Make sure to compare salaries for the correct area that currently are or are looking to relocate to if this data is available.

Conclusion #

So which report should you use? Which is best? None of the reports are perfect so I recommend checking at least 2 or 3 of them, even when you are not actively looking for a new job to keep your finger on the pulse of industry and salary trends.