This is LinkedIn’s latest crafty attempt at trying to get you to hand over your data. They’re ineloquently asking for it outright, rather than trying to mine it somehow. I suppose that makes sense. So, what’re they doing? By providing your salary amount, they promise to tell you if they think you’re not getting paid enough but you’ll also get free general salary insights for an entire year. Intriguing.

For now, I’m sure they’ll tell me that employers or recruiters aren’t going to be able to see that. In fact it says that at the bottom. And I’m sure eventually, at best, they’d get a band or range, or an anonymous aggregated average. But I can see a time in a not too distant future where recruiters will be able to work out how much they think they ought to be paying you initially based on an average… but potentially then based on what you’re getting paid now and what they think they can get away with paying you.

There’s an obvious problem with this. Taking the above example of a Marketing Manager. The salary range for this could be vast depending on the size of company or the size of budget or the team you’d be managing. I can picture scenarios where people are being told they earn a lot more, or less than others purely because of the nature of the job. It would make a lot more sense for more generic jobs, but they’re not the sort of jobs you usually get here – most of the jobs on LinkedIn are fairly nuanced in terms of role and responsibilities. I suppose LinkedIn could get a little cleverer the more data it collects… And that’s the idea. I’m still not giving them my salary though.