Any job hunter knows that one of touchier subjects that comes up on an interview is salary requirements. You don’t want to undersell yourself, of course. Nor do you want to blurt out a number that’s obscenely high and scare off a potential employer.
Enter Salary Fairy, a platform that allows you to crowdsource the salary information you need, using personalized feedback from other professions in your field and location.
Think of it as a negotiating tool that all job hunter need in their arsenal.
Cofounders Cagri and Gozde Aksay are here to tell us more about their tools for your trade.
Tell us about the product or service.
Salary Fairy is a platform to crowdsource your salary prediction. Our users get personalized salary predictions from other professionals in their field and location.
Users login with their LinkedIn credentials. Their peers predict their salary based on their education, work experience, and skills. In addition to their predicted salary, we provide a detailed prediction report that contains charts with locations and job titles of predictors.
How is it different?
Salary Fairy is the only tool in the market to utilize the wisdom of crowds for salary predictions. Our users join Salary Fairy to learn their value in the job market, without giving up their privacy. While other salary information sources give you an average or a range for salaries at a company or a location, Salary Fairy provides personal predictions by your peers.
What market are you attacking and how big is it?
We are attacking the recruiting market, which is $30B in the US and $300B worldwide.
What is the business model?
We have an opt-in recruiting program called FairPay Program. When a user enrolls in FairPay, interested employers make salary offers, starting with user’s crowdsourced salary prediction. It is a great way to keep a tab on your market value even, when you are not looking for a new job.
Companies on our platform have the advantage to make an offer to experienced and talented job candidates before they set out on the open market. We charge a fee for successful hires through our platform.
From your data, what industries are paying the most now and how much on average?
The top 3 most paying industries according to our crowdsourced data are:
1. Legal (average salary: $114K)
2. Finance (average salary: $112K)
3. Technology (average salary: $104K)
We continue to update our blog with new findings from our data as well as industry sources.
What are the milestones that you plan to achieve within 6 months?
We are currently focused on user acquisition. Our goal is to have 30,000 Salary Fairy users by the end of 2014.
If you could be put in touch with one investor in the New York community who would it be and why?
One of the investment companies we follow closely is Lerer Ventures. Ben Lerer built his own startup from the ground up, just like the startups they help. Their involvement in early stage startups is the type of value we seek.
Why are you launching in New York?
We live in New York and we love this city! We have been active in the vibrant New York startup community for about two years now. We are thrilled to see that not only the quantity, but also the quality of New York startups is improving rapidly. We also love the diversity of industries that are available to disrupt in New York: it serves the full package to start your company. We are excited to be a part of this community.
Montauk, the Hamptons, or Jersey Shore?
Hamptons! (I hope your question was to pick one :))
