Companies are culluding to suppress wages by algorithm, too. Look up a company called Aon, and their product called Radford Data & Analytics.
This meant the specialists were on a ladder with often lower pay than a standard SWE, and I couldn't shift the bureaucracy enough to change that. People left for all sorts of reasons but a big part was being able to get 2x-4x the total compensation at other companies.
Many times normal managers or more generalist HR Partners (especially if more junior) may not appreciate that this is a data error vs. a frustrated hiring manager trying to tell you their subjective feelings are more correct than policy.
That having been said: I still think the whole thing stinks.
My advice; get a better offer elsewhere, then see if HR wants to pay you your worth.
I can't get any traction with admin or HR, and we're both hemorrhaging people and can't bring in qualified new candidates.
It's very frustrating.
We have history if you couldn't tell.
Most people don't get this.
HR exists to protect the company from the employees, not protect the employees from the company.
I understand why no one likes human resources. They are there to protect the interests of the business and it is in the best interest of the employee to interact with them as little as possible. On the other hand, they are a useful resource for managers. HR frees them up from many of the administrative tasks for recruitment. They are a resource for management when they need to know something about compliance with labour regulations. Whether it is a compliance issue or the desire to retain an employee, they may just save your behind. That isn't to say that you should approach them directly. You need an advocate, otherwise they will probably view you as a liability. If you don't have that advocate (e.g. a manager or a union representative), then good luck!
Somebody has to be a comp & benefits analyst.
Somebody has to be a recruiter.
Somebody has to manage the PIPs.
Somebody has to have knowledge of the legal obligations of both sides of the employment agreement.
The book you referenced is from 2005, has the game evolved in the past 20 years? My friends who work in HR seem to think so.
Financials in our parent company dipped, and rather than address their issues they went to war with the acquisitions they had picked up over the last five years or so to try and squeeze blood from a stone.
Step 1 was to immediately replace local HR teams with a US based team who proceeded to weaponise the data that had been held by the local team.
So even if you think HR today is "pretty good", it could change from underneath you very quickly.
The change was actually wild, one of the first things they did was try to get us all to sign new employment contracts that calculated how benefits defined in law in my country apply in the hopes that nobody would notice. It was effectively a paycut they were trying to hide.
It would have reduced my salary by close to 20k had I signed it, some people did. They refused to acknowledge this sneaky change until a few employees took up legal representation and then magically we all had new contracts the very next day with the issue suddenly resolved. Prior to this they just spent weeks gaslighting people and threatening termination for anyone that didn't re-sign the new contracts.
it's easy to be good when things are going easy. it's hard to be good when times are hard.
Resources are exploited by companies.
QED.
The most profitable thing in all of human history has always been and will always be information disparity. Create systems to share information on your salary with other people in your field.
Opt out: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
I think it should be illegal to be registered for this by employer without explicit consent from the employee, forcing employees to opt out.
For example, here's an idea for one such regulation:
If the company purchases aggregated salary data, they must publish their own salaries for at least 1 year.Then sue for copyright infringement.
Meanwhile, it is an employee-rights win that the employer can't ask for your prior salary. Which of course they now already know.
We need strong laws that protect people from companies using data. Similar to credit-data usage for loans, companies should be limited to information on an application and in an interview when it comes to making employment decisions. They shouldn't be allowed to use social-media or past employment salary, or similar. At least not without explicit legal requirements and laws governing usage.
But if you want to hire someone in Poland or Korea, do you even know what their laws are? How much do lawyers cost there, and are they any good? Is the government adversarial, or could it become adversarial? Do they discriminate against foreign employers? Employees there are probably going to want to be paid in a different currency; are you interested in dealing with issues if the value of that currency changes? International banking rules? If the cheapest hires are in seven different countries, do you want to go through all this seven different times? The team you're managing now sees daylight in the part of the day when you're asleep, is that going to be any trouble? Are you ready to deal with reports being poorly written because their native language is different than yours?
The reasons companies are willing to pay more to avoid dealing with all of this have very little to do with whether you work in an office or in your house which is in the same jurisdiction and hemisphere as the office.
Some companies decide to pay at the 90th percentile of the market and some decide to pay at the 50th.
RealPage was much more proscriptive which is part of what tips the balance over into collusion vs just providing market statistics.
Zillow provides a zestimate for rents, which serves a similar market summary purpose but without the mechanism to enforce compliance and therefore is totally fine.
It can also be manipulated to suppress being paid fairly