What’s your earning potential?
What’s your earning potential in 2-4 years? What are your career prospects beyond your current role? Let’s find out shall we…
When job hunting and looking for your next company to work for, typically you’ll look at a company’s website, do a search on recent news and maybe speak to friends of friends that work there to get a feel for an organisation. But how can you get past the corporate marketing spin and PR press releases to find a more objective and representative picture? How can you find out about the calibre of people that work for a particular organisation? What your earning potential could be in 2-4 years? What employees think of their CEO? Or what opportunities employees go on to when they leave? Well, fear not! I’ve compiled a list of my top three social media websites that can answer all these questions and more to help you find the right company for you… one that fits your outlook and expectations.
1. Glassdoor
www.glassdoor.com
Here, you can find salary information by job title, company and location. The great thing about this site is that the information is posted anonymously by hundreds of employees so it gives a true and up to date reflection of actual salary bands (as opposed to corporate HR salary bands which can sometimes be adhered to in a somewhat ad hoc fashion!). The other intriguing thing about this website is that employees are invited to review their companies, providing both an average employee satisfaction rating and lots of honest company reviews. This is really useful for getting a feel for a company’s culture, strategy and priorities. On searching under Bain & Company, for instance, out of over a hundred reviews they gained an employee satisfaction rating of 4.3 out of 5, thus judging employees to be “very satisfied”. What is also telling is that nearly every review refers to Bain’s investment in career development and training - important to know if these criteria are at the top of your job shopping list! Also, in Bain’s case, the approval rating for Steve Ellis their MD is an impressive 98%. This gives a glimpse as to the level of buy in and respect for senior management - they’re clearly doing something right!
2. Social Mention
This site tracks the level of positive and negative buzz about a company online. It monitors hundreds of sites including Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube and it gives companies ratings based on four main criteria:
1. Sentiment: ratio of positive to negative mentions online
2. Strength: likelihood of a company being discussed in social media
3. Passion: likelihood that individuals who are taking about a particular company do so repeatedly i.e. the strength of advocacy
4. Reach: measure of the range of influence
So what this site can do is give you a snapshot of the level of positivity and passion for a particular company through it’s monitoring of conversations online. Keen to test it out, I put the most vilified company du moment up against Bain & Company which as we saw proved popular on our other site, Glassdoor. Needless to say sentiment towards BP’s was 1:1 (ratio of positive vs. negative comments) in contrast for every negative comment Bain receives online there are a further 31 positive ones. Give it a try, what’s the level of positivity for your future employer?
3. Linkedin
The companies search function on Linkedin can teach you a huge amount about a company. It details the male, female ratio and average age of employees. You can see what new hires a company has made recently (a good indication of the health and growth prospects of a firm) and who has moved on. But the 3 things I find most interesting are: the firms that employees go onto when they leave (career prospects upon leaving), the median tenure of employees and lastly the profiles of current employees. These all give you an idea as to the calibre of the people that work at a company, the level of employee satisfaction and your employability upon leaving a particular organisation.
So if you’re deciding which companies to apply for or are choosing between multiple job offers, give these sites a try. Hopefully they will prove useful in informing your next career move and if not at least you now know which of your friends should be picking up the bill when you next go out for lu
Catriona Drysdale is Head of Interim at FreshMinds Talent
