Comparably, the Santa Monica-based startup whose website (www.comparably.com) was launched a couple of days ago, means to improve workplaces by increasing the transparency of organizations, as far as compensations and cultures are concerned.
Founded by former Docstoc founder & CEO (sold to Intuit) Jason Nazar, as well as George Ishii (co-founder Yammer/Geni), Mike Sheridan (co-founder, DebtMarket), & Yadid Ramot (co-founder Investedin), Comparably focuses for the time-being solely on the tech industry. However, the startup’s founders promise to expand in the near future, in order to include various other domains. Under complete anonymity, the users of this service can find out what others living in the same area as them are making on a similar position.
“Our vision is to make work dramatically better for millions of employees and companies by demystifying compensation & culture,” said Nazar. “We’ve built an innovative product experience, with more comprehensive and granular data than anywhere else. You’ll finally be able to reliably see how much money you should be making, and what experience your peers are having at work.”
To find out such details, users need to select their job title from a drop down list, along with their location. For the time being, the options include Los Angeles, New York, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle and Other. However, to see what other users have answered, you’d have to input your personal salary, along with any bonuses you receive annually. If you’re more familiar with hourly rates, you have the option of including that.
Upon entering that data, you are given the option to sign up using either your LinkedIn account or your e-mail address. The former is definitely the easier way to go, but if you opt for the latter, you’ll get a link in your inbox that enables you to verify the account. Next, users have to create a password, and I can’t stress enough that you should choose a strong one that includes numbers and symbols besides upper- and lower-case letters.
The following step allows you to customize the data in order to provide increased accuracy. For that, you’ll have to select your company’s size, the number of years it’s been active, and how much money it has raised. For the sake of statistics, you are encouraged to also mention your years of experience, the gender an the zip code.
The above data isn’t particularly mind blowing, but that’s not to say that Comparably doesn’t bring anything new to the table. Quite the contrary! The service enables users with similar jobs to discuss their compensation and culture. This particular aspect has an easy to use interface that provides a wonderful user experience. Since answers need to be less than 225 characters long (that’s a bit more than what Twitter allows), users need to make sure that they are concise, and that they’re answering other people’s questions accurately.
Comparably already is a very useful service, but it’ll be interesting to see the directions it will take next.
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