China Pay Scale

By Frank Mulligan - Recruit China

Payscale, the website, havenít arrived in a big way in China yet but when they do HR departments better be prepared for more fuel on the fire that represents the War for Talent. They canít help you fix the skills shortages problem but they can tell you if you are paying more than your competitors.

Information is power and Payscale offers a website where candidates, Recruiters, CandB professionals, employees and business intelligence specialists can go to compare salaries with other professionals; in their industry, and at their pay grade.

Luckily for us, a quick test of the site shows that the information for China is a little sparce. Phew! However, continued confidence in this state of affairs would not be justified. The site is growing fast and the quality of its data is dependent on usage patterns. China is just not on Payscaleís radar yet but at some point it will be. As they grow their base of users Payscaleís value proposition gets better and better.

The original idea was that candidates and staff would be willing to give anonymous salary data to someone they did not know, if they could get real-time salary comparison data in return. The growth of the site seems to vindicate their thinking and the resulting service solves one of the biggest problems that Recruiters and hiring managers have ie. finding current market rates for the positions they are trying to fill.

This is clearly part of a global trend towards Web 2.0. I canít say there is a universally agreed notion of what Web 2.0 means but it includes user generated content, or this case, user generated data. Payscale also fits in well with the whole Word of Mouth idea idea.

(On a completely different note, my own contribution to Web 2.0 is a wiki that collects information about hiring in China, and then presents it to the public for viewing as a definitive hiring document. Please feel free to contribute to the wiki if you know anything about talent acquisition in China. There is so much going on in Web 2.0 I canít keep up, and I try really hard to keep up...)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Payscale report more than 7 million profiles and say they get over 1.5 million unique visitors a month. So far they have data for about 2% of the US workforce and they monetize all this by selling aggregated data to companies, industry websites and research organizations.

Not bad for something that used to be just passed in whispers. For free.

Tip Oí The Hat to CNET for the original story.

Email frank.mulligan@recruit-china.com
Frank Mulliganís blog - english.talent-software.com