Thursday, November 6, 2008

WowJobs Canada Salary Search

WowJobs is a vertical search engine for the Canadian marketplace. It has already done cool stuff like search for results in Craigslist, but now, based on the information in the job postings that it skims, the search engine can provide a salary search.


 

As shown above, you can also compare salaries between types of jobs or by location. I went Canada-wide to get an idea of the basic salaries, but you can--and should, if you are asked to provide a quote--search geographic-specific.

Where do they get the numbers? From job postings that supply salary information. It is not clear, when a range is used, if they use the bottom of the range or the top of the range to create their calculation. Not every job provides salary information, so it isn't taking data from all of the postings that the engine has scraped. To ameliorate this issue, WowJobs is supplying a confidence level: how sure are they that the numbers are accurate? and including this with the results that you receive for your search.

This service is currently in beta, so we can expect more improvements as they get more sophisticated with the enormous amount of raw data supplied in a posting. Maybe they'll run a map mash-up that will let us see where particular jobs are concentrated, based on their historical data? For example, more postings in Toronto in June or October?

You can use this search engine to supplement the salary information that you find from other professional library sources.

No comments: