ideambulate

I bet you can learn a lot about a company by taking a look and how, when, and how much they pay their employees.  Naturally, to get the most out of this theoretical analysis, the data should be correlated with  publicly accessible or easily determinable individual information like employee positions, job title progressions, and larger stats such as industry health and company profits.

Once all the caveats are in place, I think that it might be possible to measure and model how the company rewards and encourages certain career-scale behaviors.  We could put a number on in-company job mobility, measure just how long it takes for corporate success to trickle into the wallets of workers, and maybe even quantify philosophical emphasis on the importance of given roles within the corporate community.

While I’m sure that this sort of analysis is already conducted within companies, I wonder how difficult it would be to accomplish as an outsider.  Perhaps targeted voluntary polling could generate representative payroll numbers and job descriptions.  Maybe this sort of examination could be a service provided by the companies to which other business outsource their payroll management and software.

If you put enough companies put under payroll-enriched scrutiny, one could develop a strong tool for potential employees looking to evaluate their career options.