How we estimate salaries

Initial confusion

After our initial reddit post on r/cscareerquestionsuk, there was some confusion regarding the job salaries we were showing. People were confused as to where these values were coming from. Some people also stated that the values seemed inaccurate. So in this post we've decided to share exactly how we estimate salaries.

The easy case

Whenever an employer lists a salary on a job posting, we'll use that value. Simple!

The difficulty comes when the employer doesn't tell us what the salary is. When this happens, we go to Glassdoor.

Using Glassdoor

Glassdoor allows you to see a job's salary for varying years of experience:

All
0-1 Year
1-3 Years
...

Since GradFlow only caters to graduate jobs, we're mainly interested in the 0-1 Year salary estimate (although All and 1-3 Years will still come in handy).

Glassdoor also shows its confidence estimate for each salary listed in a given experience bracket. The confidence ranges from Low to Very High.

Calculating values

When the confidence rating for the 0-1 Year bracket is Very High or High, the salary we show will be the mean base pay + the mean additional pay for that bracket.

If there's no accurate salary data in the 0-1 Year bracket, but there is accurate salary data in the 1-3 Years bracket, the salary we show will be the lower quartile base pay + lower quartile additional pay in the 1-3 Years bracket.

Using lower quartiles to calculate salaries from the 1-3 Years bracket has a suprisingly good correlation with using the mean to calculate salaries from the 0-1 Year bracket. We know this because there are many jobs on Glassdoor with high confidence data in both brackets, meaning we can work out a correlation between the two.

If there's still no accurate salary data in the 1-3 Years bracket, we apply the same lower quartile logic to get a value from the All salary bracket. This still tends to correlate well with mean 0-1 Year salaries.

And finally, if there's no accurate data in the All salary bracket, we don't provide a salary esitimate. You'll see a '?' as the job salary if that's case.

Conclusion

Currently we're using Glassdoor, but as some comments mentioned in our initial post, there are cases where levels.fyi may be able to provide better estimates. This is something we're trying to incorporate.

If you have any feedback on how we're calculating salaries, or if you think there's a better way to do this, please let us know.

If you join our discord, you can post your ideas in the feedback channel.