Know your initial worth in market

For those mulling their first job offer and wondering if they are being paid right, here is a website that could give an indication.

After the successful launch of paycheck.in, a portal which gives transparent wage rates across sectors, cities and countries, the Indian Institute of Management- Ahmedabad (IIM-A), IT Professionals Forum-Bangalore and Indian Institute of Science-Bangalore are now planning to launch fresherpaycheck.in.

This would be one of the first websites in India providing salary information to companies hiring at entry-levels and to those without work experience, who want to know their professional worth.

fresherpaycheck.in would be a part of the WageIndicator Foundation, a non-profit organisation and a joint initiative of FNV (Dutch confederation of trade unions), the University of Amsterdam/AIAS (Institute of Advanced Labour Studies) and career website Monster. The portal would contain entry-level information for those wanting to apply across several sectors like IT, finance and services.

Like paycheck.in, visitors to the site will be able to fill up a short questionnaire pertaining to their current employment, salary, incentives and educational background, which would be added to the database. Companies will also be able to fill in details on their wage structures, making it easy for freshers to have an idea of what salary they can quote during interviews. To protect the identity of the users, the portal will have personal details like name and company under wraps.

"We are working on fresherpaycheck.in and will look to discuss more details with the Wageindicator Foundation in Amsterdam," said Biju Varkkey, an IIM-A professor. He said the website was being planned to help young professionals and that nearly 1,000 hits a day were expected after its inception around July 2008.

Despite giving information on specific domains like womenpaycheck.in and ITpaycheck.in, Varkkey said most visitors to paycheck.in wanted to know others' salaries and did not want to put their own salaries on the database. The website receives as many as 1,500 hits a day but just 300 or so fill up the salary questionnaire. To counter this, fresherpaycheck.in is looking at fewer questions so that the process would be simpler.

The questionnaire takes information relating to the user's sector, geographical position, profile, salary package, perquisites and other wage-based information anonymously, which could be compared by someone interested in the same position.

To encourage visitors to fill up the questionnaires, prizes like a trip to Africa or an iPod are also being offered by paycheck.in and similar wage websites affiliated to the Wageindicator Foundation. The site also has a separate section called VIP paycheck, which gives details on salaries drawn by famous personalities like Pratibha Patil, Sachin Tendulkar, Serena Williams and Hillary Clinton.