What was the genesis of Salary.com?
KP: Right before I started Salary.com I was building software for What Color Is Your Parachute?, which is also in the career management space. There we ended our process with a recommendation as to what would be a good career fit for an individual. The goal was to identify where people would be able to succeed based on their skills, attitudes and interests. There were no readily available data sources as to how much jobs or careers in those areas would pay. We looked around to find resources and looked at how the industry was structured. Consulting firms had data. Around the same time I had personal experience that really triggered the idea. I needed to hire a secretary and I could not get a straight answer from anybody as to how much I should pay the person. That brought the frustration and pain home. As a business user I desperately wanted to offer a fair pay package – that experience reinforced the point, and that is when we looked at the industry closely. We found that a bunch of t
