Candor crowdsources a database of tech job salaries

Candor said it is crowdsourcing a database of salaries for jobs in the technology industry to give employees good intelligence for job negotiations.

The company has started taking additional submissions for salaries, and it has gotten more than 1,000 submissions since Wednesday. Candor is reviewing those submissions but is still receiving hundreds of submissions per day and has to mobilize more resources to handle the incoming data.

Candor has already compiled the largest free public tech salary database for individuals. It now has 5.3 million data points for 1,708 companies across 120 individual job roles, such as engineering and operations. And it has added tools that show a cost-of-living differential since people are accepting offers in new cities, but companies don’t always provide the most reliable information on cost of living in their locations.

Candor spokesperson Jessica Li said initial submissions focused on San Francisco and New York, but new information is coming in for cities like Atlanta; Chicago; and Washington, D.C. There are also lots of submissions coming in from cities like Zurich, Johannesburg, Toronto, and Bangalore. And many of the submissions are for fully remote jobs. Li said the submissions are growing at a viral rate.

Above: Candor helps tech workers negotiate salaries.

Image Credit: Candor

Last spring, Candor compiled a list of all the tech companies that were hiring, firing, or freezing positions during the pandemic. Now the company is collecting data on salaries so people can negotiate with full knowledge of what is being paid to employees or offered to other candidates. The largest salary submitted was for $ 2 million in total compensation, while the lowest was $ 65,000. (These are tech jobs, after all).

Candor said most big companies have access to a shared salary database called Radford, which more than 2,800 tech companies access. Individuals can’t purchase this data, but tech companies use it to benchmark salaries against each other and to determine the lowest amount they can pay candidates while staying competitive, Li said. But now Candor can use the crowdsourced information to turn the tables and give employees knowledge about positions.

Candor’s salary list is a free tool available for anyone in the tech community. Candor helps tech professionals negotiate their salaries, and a lot of this data is sourced directly from clients who are experiencing the situation live on the ground.