Let's Talk About Compensation
Featuring a survey!
UPDATE: You can find the results from this survey here.
There are a few pivotal moments that come to mind in terms of my compensation and knowing my worth, and not one of them involves Glassdoor or PayScale. Not only are these sites impossible to navigate (I just tried to calculate my salary on Glassdoor and got sent into an endless loop of submitting) but they don’t get granular enough to really help you understand what you should be making. Instead, every single one of those pivotal moments came from a friend or colleague being transparent about their pay.
I’ll never forget asking a woman who had left the company I was working for what she made in a role similar to the one I had just moved up into. My boss had told me that I was making a fair salary: my role had pay brackets, and I was well within them. But then I found out that woman made around $20k more than me in an almost identical role. If I had known at the time that I could even ask for a number that much higher, I would have felt much more confident in my negotiating. Pay transparency also helps close gender, race, and other unjust wage gaps. This week’s newsletter is about rounding up those conversations that often happen on Slack or text into a helpful resource. If you work in social media, please fill out the survey here. The results will automatically be compiled into a running document for social media managers to gut check offers, bolster an argument for a raise, or just gain insight into how certain companies pay. The next step in this now official Link in Bio compensation project will be to work with a Data Person (reply to this email if you are that person!) to help find interesting themes within the responses. More to come!
As a reminder, responses are publicly visible so don't reveal identifiable information if you wish to remain anonymous! Thanks to #FreelancerPayGap and the Food Industry Compensation Survey for helping provide the framework for this survey. I recommend checking out both those surveys (especially if you are a freelancer or work in the food industry).
Since this is a short newsletter, here are a few things that are on my mind:
I truly can’t get enough of embedded, a newsletter dedicated to what’s good on the internet from the minds of Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci. Particularly loved this one on TikTok oversharer Victoria Paris.
Read this Taylor Lorenz deep dive into how TikTok is creating the next big food stars…
Then read this Reina Gascon-Lopez deep dive into how viral recipes shut out BIPOC food creators. “We need to see a variety of Black and brown hands preparing and cooking all kinds of food online, the same way white food personalities do: Going viral outside of our own communities and embracing all of the professional successes and opportunities that come with it.”
If you’re looking for a newsletter that rounds up what happened on social media each week (from viral moments to platform updates) definitely subscribe to Lia Haberman’s social trends newsletter.
Speaking of updates, we finally have Reels insights!
I got angry over this Instagram headline from the LA Times and commented on it. And then thought about how to hold large companies accountable without making their social media manager’s day a nightmare (my old coworker Emily Schultz brought this up the other day too). But then also remembered that higher ups usually only care or make changes when there is public outcry. Oof.
Do I need to make pinecone jam??? Alexis Nikole makes a compelling case.
100 percent cannot stop thinking about this Clickhole post.
Okay, that’s all! I promise more job postings soon. And if you’ve gotten this far and still haven’t taken the survey, please do! And please share with any friends who also work in social!
Where can we find the results of the survey?
Holy moly there is an insane range of salaries in this survey. Some of these salaries are criminal.