Specific question for threading purposes: what do people think about changing the EA organization talent survey to include questions on how their pay compares to what candidates could otherwise earn at other nonprofits or in the for-profit sector? List of proposed questions and changes here.
I love the idea of gathering this information. But would EA orgs be able to answer the salary questions accurately? I particularly wonder about the question comparing salaries at the org to for-profit companies. If the org isn’t paying for compensation data (as many for-profit companies do), they may not really be in a good position to make that comparison. Their employees, especially those who have always worked in nonprofits, may not even know how much they could be making. Perhaps the org could cobble together a guess via Glassdoor, but limitations of the data on there would make that difficult to do meaningfully, not to mention time-consuming.
For orgs willing to share, it would be better to get the granular salary data itself (ideally, correlated to experience and education).
I think some EA organizations will have a good sense of how their pay stacks up, while others won’t have a good reference. One of the benefits of starting to collect info is that these latter organizations will be able to make more informed decisions.
Granular salary data would be terrific as you note, but I’m a bit concerned over how time consuming that could be for organizations to provide. It’ll also be important to supplement any data from EA employers with survey data from EA job seekers too; I doubt we’ll get a clear picture from one source alone.
Specific question for threading purposes: what do people think about changing the EA organization talent survey to include questions on how their pay compares to what candidates could otherwise earn at other nonprofits or in the for-profit sector? List of proposed questions and changes here.
I love the idea of gathering this information. But would EA orgs be able to answer the salary questions accurately? I particularly wonder about the question comparing salaries at the org to for-profit companies. If the org isn’t paying for compensation data (as many for-profit companies do), they may not really be in a good position to make that comparison. Their employees, especially those who have always worked in nonprofits, may not even know how much they could be making. Perhaps the org could cobble together a guess via Glassdoor, but limitations of the data on there would make that difficult to do meaningfully, not to mention time-consuming.
For orgs willing to share, it would be better to get the granular salary data itself (ideally, correlated to experience and education).
I think some EA organizations will have a good sense of how their pay stacks up, while others won’t have a good reference. One of the benefits of starting to collect info is that these latter organizations will be able to make more informed decisions.
Granular salary data would be terrific as you note, but I’m a bit concerned over how time consuming that could be for organizations to provide. It’ll also be important to supplement any data from EA employers with survey data from EA job seekers too; I doubt we’ll get a clear picture from one source alone.