What Color Is Your Parachute? (28 page)

Now, exactly how do you go about getting this information? Let’s look at some concrete examples:

You may not need to do any salary research. They pay what they pay. You can walk in, ask for a job application, and interview with the manager. He or she will usually tell you the pay, outright. It’s usually set in concrete. But at least it’s easy to discover what the pay is. (Incidentally, filling out an application, or having an interview there, doesn’t force you to take the job—but you probably already know that. You can always decline an offer from
any place
. That’s what makes this approach harmless.)

If that construction company where you would
hope
to get a job is difficult to research, go visit a
different
construction company in the same town—one that isn’t of much interest to you—and ask what they make
there.
Or, if you don’t know who to talk to there, fill out one of
their
applications, and talk to the hiring person about what kinds of jobs they have (or might have in the future), at which time prospective wages is a legitimate subject of discussion. Then, having done this research on a place you don’t care about, go back to the place that
really
interests you, and apply. You still don’t know
exactly
what they pay, but you do know what their competitor pays—which will usually be
close.

Here you can often find useful salary information by perusing the Help Wanted ads in the local newspaper for a week or two, assuming you still have a local paper! Most of the ads won’t mention a salary figure, but a few may. Among those that do, note what the lowest salary offering is, and what the highest is, and see if the ad reveals some reasons for the difference. It’s interesting how much you can learn about administrative assistants’ salaries, with this approach. I know, because I was an administrative assistant myself, once upon a time.

Another way to do salary research is to find a
Temporary Work Agency
that places secretaries, and let yourself be farmed out to various offices: the more, the merrier. It’s relatively easy to do salary research when you’re
inside
a place. (Study what that place pays
the agency
, not what the agency pays you after they’ve taken their “cut.”) If you’re working temporarily at a place where the other workers
like
you, you’ll be able to ask questions about a lot of things, including salary.

Before you go into any organization for your final interview, you want more than just
one
salary figure at your fingertips. You want
a range:
what’s the
least
the employer may offer you, and what’s the
most
the employer may be willing to offer you. In any organization that has more than five employees, that range is relatively easy to figure out. It will be less than
what the person who would be above you makes
, and more than
what the person who would be below you makes
.

One teensy-tiny little problem here:
how
do you find out the salary of those who would be above and below you? Well, first you have to find out their
names
or the names of their
positions
. If it is a small organization you are going after—one with twenty or fewer employees—finding out this information should be
duck soup
. Any employee who works there is likely to know the answer, and you can usually get in touch with one of those employees, or even an ex-employee, through your own personal
contacts. Since up to two-thirds of all new jobs are created by companies that size, that’s the size organization you are likely to be researching, anyway.

If you are going after a larger organization, then you fall back on our familiar life preserver, namely, every
contact
you have (family, friend, relative, business, or spiritual acquaintance) who might know the company, and therefore, the information you seek. In other words, you are looking for Someone Who Knows Someone who either is working, or has worked, at the particular place or places that interest you, and who therefore has or can get this information for you.

If, in the end, you absolutely run into a blank wall at a particular organization (everyone who works there is pledged to secrecy, and they have shipped all their ex-employees to Siberia), then seek out information on their nearest
competitor
in the same geographic area.
For example,
let us say you were researching managerial salaries at Bank X, and they were proving to be inscrutable about what they pay their managers. You would then try Bank Y as your research base, to see if the information were easier to come by, there. And if it were, you can then assume the two were similar in their pay scales, and that what you learned about Bank Y was applicable to Bank X.

Experts say that in researching salaries, you should also take note of the fact that most governmental agencies have civil service positions matching those in private industry, and government job descriptions and pay ranges are available to the public. Go to the nearest city, county, regional, state, or federal civil service office, find the job description nearest what you are seeking in private industry, and then ask the starting salary.