What’s your annual compensation like? Do you get a bonus? What about stock compensation?
How much money do you make? LinkedIn wants to know.
LinkedIn is adding salary information to its site to help job seekers.
Warner Bros.
LinkedIn wants to know.
The professional network is adding salary information to its collection of user data so people can use that info to compare and contrast potential employers, cities and career paths when looking for a new job.
It seems like a helpful tool — salary information is usually kept private, which can make it uncomfortable to discuss with colleagues or potential colleagues. LinkedIn wants to aggregate that salary information from its more than 460 million registered members and then pass out the collective insights for free.
Well, technically free. In order to use the product, you need to share your own salary information with LinkedIn (or pay for a premium account). LinkedIn says this information won’t be used on your profile, and it’s stored anonymously on the company’s servers. But the idea is that you need to give a little in order to get a little.
LinkedIn says it’s not currently getting salary info from companies themselves, but that it may someday in the future. It also plans to draw correlations between salary info and other LinkedIn info, like skills and level of education.
“To learn via LinkedIn that there’s a new trending skill and it actually impacts compensation in your field — you need to know that,” Dan Shapero, the lead for LinkedIn’s career products, told Recode. “We’re very excited about this not just being something that people visit to answer questions, but part of a general theme of LinkedIn looking out for you in your career.”
LinkedIn isn’t the only one looking out for you, of course. Glassdoor has offered salary info for particular careers and cities for years, and PayScale, which does the same, has been around for well over a decade. But LinkedIn has a large user base and lots of people who already use the site to post and find jobs. Coupling that behavior with salary information certainly makes sense.
The new salary tool will be available beginning Wednesday to users in the U.S., U.K. and Canada.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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