Holistic co-founders Roger Lee (right) and Teddy Sherrill (left). The compensation startup has launched a free data site that tracks, in aggregate, how well companies comply with new pay transparency laws.
Photo by Frank Xiao, comprehensive courtesy.
tThe founder of a website that tracks companies cutting jobs in the tech sector has highlighted a new issue: the extent to which tech companies are following new laws requiring salary ranges for job openings.
As of Thursday, just 50% of the 700 tech companies tracked by Comprehensive.io, a new free website, disclosed a salary range in the majority of their postings for jobs located either in California or a remote location.
says Roger Lee, who co-founded a comprehensive compensation review software platform for HR professionals who built the new free site. Lee is also the creator of Layoffs.fyi, the widely referenced website that has been tracking big job cuts in the tech sector since 2020.
The number was growing rapidly. On Dec. 31, one day before the effective date of a new California law that requires companies to include pay scales in assignments for jobs located in California or remotely, only 22.7% of companies tracked by Comprehensive.io tracked pay ranges in The majority of vacancies. The next day, that number jumped to 28.2%. By January 5, it was 39%, and by January 12, it had reached 50.2%.
In New York City, where a similar law went into effect on November 1 and that Comprehensive.io is also tracking, nearly 67% of companies are in compliance, up from 54.7% on December 31. Built by the overarching engineering team, led by co-founder Teddy Sherrill, it “will further accelerate the efforts of the Transparency Acts to achieve full pay transparency and full pay equity,” Lee says.
The site scrapes job postings for 700 tech companies from their career websites, automatically aggregates disclosed salary ranges and revisits companies’ job pages each day for new data. While the site doesn’t call out individual companies for their compliance rate, a search for jobs at a specific company will turn up all the postings that include salary ranges — and all those that don’t. Companies that do not disclose salary data in any publications will not currently appear in search results, but Lee says that was unintentional, and that will be fixed in the coming days.
On January 8th, Lee shared some examples of companies — Stripe, Atlassian, and DocuSign — that, as of January 6, had no payroll included for any of their remote or remote California job openings.
But this is already changing. In an emailed statement, Stripe said, “We support recent efforts to demand more pay transparency for job candidates. We are working toward an imminent global rollout of these salary ranges in fairness to all applicants, and we will publish ranges for all US job openings (not just those located in California and Washington) this week.”
Atlassian has also begun updating its jobs to include salary ranges, saying in a statement this week that the company supports the legislation, and “has established moving salary ranges by geographic region for each active job across the US, which we are in the process of rolling out and planning to finalize by Friday.” “. Indeed, more job postings now include salary ranges.
DocuSign has not responded to ForbesAsked for comment, but as of Jan. 12, the site shows 173 postings for DocuSign jobs based remotely or in California, with the majority now including salary ranges.
Such fast-moving changes show how quickly many companies are adapting and preparing to implement the laws, which are now in effect in eight states or local municipalities, including Colorado, New York, California and Washington state. Compensation experts say companies have had to scramble to prepare, which means explaining salary ranges to current employees, reviewing equity compensation tables, and clarifying differences between employment ranges and total job salary ranges.
Sites like Comprehensive.io can add to this pressure. “We’re moving towards more democratization of data,” says Kristin Hendrickson, vice president of strategic initiatives at Sendeo, which performs pay equity analytics for companies.
She said that unlike some of the unofficial spreadsheet files she’s seen her share, Comprehensive.io is the first to publicly aggregate data in this way. “It’s something that HR leaders have access to, and that brings it to something a lot like Zillow or a kind of market that shows ‘This is what jobs pay for.'”
Other external sites can also help pressure companies into compliance. The job site Indeed said in December that in places where there is a law requiring employers to include wage information, the company will not allow new jobs to be posted directly on Indeed (as opposed to those indexed from other job or job sites) unless they include payroll.
While some companies may not want to share information, Hendrickson said she finds most try to comply. She suggested one reason many ads still appeared without salary ranges — noting that she didn’t know enough about the site’s methodology or software — was that some companies might interpret the law as only applying to jobs actively posted on or after January 1, she says. There are also technical hurdles in some applicant tracking systems that would make it difficult – if not impossible – to modify an older job.
Other employment attorneys say the law in California applies to all job openings. “Somehow old job vacancies aren’t created,” says Erin Connell, co-chair of the Oric Pay Equity Task Force. She says California law says the state labor commissioner can issue penalties of $100 to $10,000 per violation, and that companies that don’t comply won’t be penalized for their first violation as long as the payroll is updated.
Beyond compliance questions, Comprehensive.io offers job seekers a way to compare what different tech companies pay by job title in an aggregated way than searching for individual postings on job sites, as well as to see what popular job titles pay. middle.
A quick look at the site’s dashboard, for example, shows that across 158 companies and 677 positions (as of Jan. 12), the average salary range for a senior software engineer is $148,000 to $210,000. This data is potentially more useful than the site’s ranking of the highest paying companies, as Netflix tops the list but includes many jobs that have salary ranges spanning hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The site is already calling for unwanted attention from companies that publish such broad pay scales, which do little to help job seekers figure out how to negotiate or help with the pay equality concerns that prompted their adoption. Still, he says the midrange is in line with what HR experts recommend — 20 percent above and 20 percent below the midpoint — and he hopes the site will nudge more companies toward doing the same, moving away from outliers. “Over time, and hopefully through the efforts of companies like ours, companies will realize that publishing large scales has a downside.”
