LinkedIn Salary tool will help you check your peers’ salaries

Do you want to know how much your rival colleague is getting paid? We all actually do. And because, we cannot go and ask so upfront, LinkedIn wants to do the favours. After providing 'secret signal' feature, LinkedIn has launched LinkedIn Salary, a new portal and tracker to collect and analyse salaries globally where you can learn about others’ salary figure.

LinkedIn Salary allows users to find how much a particular job earns - salary, bonus, and equity data. Currently, the tool covers jobs in the U.S., U.K., and Canada only.

When users input their profession and location, LinkedIn’s tool shows them a breakdown of others’ compensation. Users can then filter by years of experience, education level, and other criteria.

In the case, you discover that those with more experience or a relevant graduate degree are consistently paid more, the data will give guidance as to how to achieve the compensation level one wants.

LinkedIn Director of Product Management Dan Shapero said, "One of the things in our research that has become quite obvious is that salary is a big part of how people make career decisions.”

Before launching the site, LinkedIn has been reaching out to its 1 million users across various locations to submit data about their compensation.

In order to use the tool, users will have to contribute their own salary information to the database. If any user inputs fake details, LinkedIn has placed machine learning to detect such database. However, if you are Premium user, you can access the data without sharing your own salary structure.

According to the TechCrunch report, LinkedIn launched Salary because the company believes that there is nothing that offers the kind of detail that LinkedIn is aiming to provide. “There just isn’t a global salary for a software engineer,” Dan Shapero told TechCrunch, “not even for one in New York City. The salary varies too much, so understanding what you can do to put yourself in a position to earn more is important.”

He further concluded, “We believe people would invest in themselves more if they knew the certain return on investment.”

LinkedIn also plans to tie-up with universities to mould its salary tool to the needs of students as they plan their careers and help users to work toward the compensation level they want, when applicable.