Adam Torres and Cary Sparrow discuss turning data into dollars.
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Show Notes:
WageScape shows you what’s happening with wages right now – for any job, in any location. This information is critical for attracting and retaining talent and for setting strategies for recruiting, pay, and growth. In this episode, Adam Torres and Cary Sparrow, Founder & CEO at WageScape. Explore WageScape and how businesses are using data to thrive.
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About WageScape
WageScape delivers real-time labor market intelligence to all audiences – practical, timely, comprehensive.
WageScape offers the only source of next-generation compensation intelligence designed to provide the insights needed in today’s fast-moving, hyper-competitive talent market.
WageScape shows you what’s happening with wages right now – for any job, in any location. This information is critical for attracting and retaining talent and for setting strategies for recruiting, pay, and growth.
WageScape is the only source of pay intelligence that’s forward-looking, so you see where pay is going – not just where it’s been. And, it’s easy to use interface allows you to start gaining insights in minutes.
Plus, because WageScape uses data from public-facing sources, it’s completely transparent. This means you can see data on individual jobs and companies with no lag time.
WageScape is now available with international data directly at your fingertips to help you make decisions for your international business. Hiring and pay data is available now for Australia, Canada, UK, and Ireland. Hiring data only is available for New Zealand.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is Cary Sparrow and he’s founder and CEO over at Wagescape.
Cary, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks Adam for having me on. All right, Cary. So we got a big topic today, turning data into dollars, staying ahead of market events by quickly identifying opportunities and risks. A lot of business owners, a lot of executives that watch this show, a lot of entrepreneurs and turning data into dollars sounds like music to my ears.
So we’re going to get into that and much more, but to get us started we’ll start this episode the way that we start them all with what we call our mission matters minute. So Cary, at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s what we do.
Cary, what mission matters to you? So WageScape was founded with a lofty goal of helping to make the labor market more transparent. Which, if you think about it, the job market touches Everyone in the world, it touches all of our lives, all of our families, all of our communities, all of our countries every organization.
So it’s incredibly pervasive and important and information about it is really pretty poor by all objective standards. So we, you know, our mission is to change that and by bringing better insights to what’s happening in the labor market, we open doors to great innovation and also great efficiencies.
When did you first, like, identify this opportunity to be able to help and start a company and decide to kind of pair your, you know, your entrepreneurial prowess to it? Like, how’d that begin? Where’d the idea start? I’ve had, this is my fourth career. So I’ve worked doing different types of things. I was in the Navy in engineering jobs.
I was, I worked for a big consulting firm you know, running consulting businesses and, and helping like literally a couple of hundred organizations solve, you know, really difficult business challenges. And I worked as a corporate executive helping to, you know, Build out, you know, global infrastructure to help manage their workforce much more effectively.
And so along the way, just picked up kind of insights on things that aren’t working, always had kind of a view of where their market opportunities that we can take advantage of and all the different types of roles that I was in. But it really started to come together when I started to see kind of the pace of change around, around.
The quality of information that’s available but being underutilized when it comes to what’s going on in the labor market. I mean, my, my business training is a really strong economics foundation to it. And so any economist will tell you that anytime you’ve got a really big market and really bad information about it, that it doesn’t operate the way that it should.
And when you’ve got a market that touches everyone, the way that the job market does, And you’ve got information that’s really not very good and you can improve that, then there’s a real opportunity there. And so when I was in my last job, I started asking around to say, Hey, it looks like, you know, the reason why the information about, you know, what jobs are available and what skills are needed and how much you’re paying people and how much people need to be paid and things like that, which right now, You know, actually at the time and still today, there’s a lot of guesswork that goes into that.
And I’m like the underlying reasons for, for that seem to be able to be managed better. Now we’re talking about consolidation of technology more sophistication in terms of the ability to combine information from across organizations. And And the consulting partners and the technology partners that we were working with at the time, you know, really kind of scratched their heads and didn’t know what to do with that kind of insight.
And so I broke off and founded what, you know, what became Wagescape to pursue that. And, and we’ve had a really interesting ride. It’s been nine years and you know, demand for what we do has been growing at a very steady clip and it’s really accelerated coming out of the pandemic, I would say. Wow.
What was the and congrats on the nine year, like almost to the 10, like a interesting, the person that I my last interview, he just, he just hit his 10 years. So I’m like, man, 10 years are big. It’s a big deal to be able to survive. So first off, congrats on the nine years. That’s a big deal. I do want to stay in the beginning a little bit longer when you decided to break off, like what was the opportunity that you saw just in the market as an entrepreneur?
Like, like give us some of, of, of what went into your decision to start this. Yeah. So it started specifically around helping people understand what what they should be paying for jobs. Very, very kind of, you know, specific narrow slice of kind of what’s going on in the labor market. And, and the reason is that.
At the time, and really to this day in most cases, if you want to know what to pay somebody, you’re going to use information that was collected or that was, was based on pay decisions that are typically at least a year and a half old. Lots can happen between them. The information was typically collected between six and 12 months ago.
So lots could pop up. Happen there. And the information is then consolidated because the sample sizes are pretty small, relatively speaking. And so that’s how pay decisions get made is by using information that is out of date, it’s very small samples and it’s very difficult to understand. And I had done a lot of work with that information.
I’ve done a lot of work helping companies. You know, get better at setting pay strategies, using pay strategies to keep the employees that they had and attract the employees that they need and so forth. And I just saw a really big opportunity because I know how much
that had paid data. And so we went out and collected, built some tech to collect lots of data. Data from job ads, job advertisements, job listings, and it my thought originally was that we would integrate in with a lot of kind of core enterprise technology that does like recruiting and pay management, employee management and stuff and get data directly from there.
And, and. Manage it, you know, very securely, obviously. But along the way, I figured out that there actually is all this data that’s sitting out there in the public domain in job ads, and it’s way richer than anything you could get from internal HR systems. And so once we realized that, then it was like game on.
Cause all we got to do is just go and massively collect that data, organize it in a way that, you know, makes, you know, is very, very well architected, extract all the intelligence that we can out of it. We discovered along the way that we, you know, kind of stumbled into a couple of methods that nobody else was trying.
So we’re able to get pay data on about 75 percent of all the jobs that are listed in the U S and, and. Most of those jobs actually don’t show pay data. The way that we do it is kind of part of our secret sauce. And so, you know, it’s a series of like literally every day, Adam, I would wake up knowing that whatever I thought needed to be done and how it was wrong.
In some way, and that was actually a huge kind of mental shift, you know, coming out of, out of a corporate, you know, executive environment was, you know, where, where I moved out of immediately prior to wage scape. And there you get paid to move risk out and to bring certainty to a situation. And, and as, you know, as a founder, you know, there are a gazillion things that will kill the company.
And so you, your biggest risk is not moving fast enough. And, and so. You, you know, that you’ve got to make decisions based on incomplete data. So. You know, a big part of what I had to learn was how to prioritize the unknowns and go after the ones that you know, were the most important. And so, you know, that’s, that was all part and parcel.
I, you know, I knew enough that there was an opportunity. I knew enough that other people weren’t looking at it. I jumped after it and I did it in a way that allowed us to be really flexible. We didn’t lock in on a solution. And we basically. Took a learning approach to everything that we, we did. And so you, and so you mentioned 75 percent that, that of, of, you know, jobs, that’s a huge amount.
So then I’m guessing any job, any location, like I’m just trying to get a feel for like what, what type of employers would use the platform? Like get into that. All kinds, right? And so whether you’re recruiting somebody, you’re trying to keep your own employees or you’re, you know, you’re setting your own pay strategy.
So and so company just moved in they got a big warehouse. They’re paying 5 more an hour than what we’re paying in our warehouse. You know, do we need to change what we’re paying? Well, go out and take a look at who else hires those kinds of warehouse workers, what are they paying? Cause it may be that that new company is bringing a hundred jobs in, but, you know, there’s actually 10, 000 of those jobs in the market, so you don’t need to chase that, or it could be that, you know, that’s a really big deal and, and you need to convince people that.
You need to act on it. Well, any kind of company is worried about how competitive they are from a pay standpoint, any kind of company. It’s not good enough to say jobs in in Iowa pay this much. You’ve got to know, you know, in Cedar Rapids. HVAC technicians that specialize in this kind of product get paid this much.
And here’s the companies that are hiring them and how much each of those companies are getting paid. And that’s the data that we deal with. It’s that kind of data. It’s that level of precision. That’s amazing though, cause that lets you, you know, as close as you get apples to apples, right? So like you’re comparing the right, the right use case scenario and the right data so that, you know, you’re making an informed decision and where you stand.
So then That’s exactly right. And then, and then you can just pull that thread even, even more if you’re competing for talent and knowing like, what are all the different benefits that, you know, my competition is offering for the same types of jobs is hugely valuable and important. If you’re trying to, you know, Keep your own, your own talent.
You’re going to pay an awful lot of money if you chase whoever the highest price employer is in your market. And you’re going to lose a ton of people if you’re the lowest price employer in your market. And so knowing exactly what that looks like and being able to exactly match these kinds of jobs fit with what, you know, what What we have and these kinds of jobs, even if it’s not in the same industry, like like the, let’s just use the HVAC technician example, how many different types of companies do you think employ HVAC technicians?
It’s not just, you know, manufacturing jobs or, or industrial jobs. There’s all kinds of, and most people historically have no idea where their competition for those, those jobs really is. And so that now is essential. I think there’s absolutely the awareness now coming out of the pandemic That like you said any job any location, any industry you’ve got to know what’s going on you got to know at that level of precision in order to be competitive and in order to be cost effective yeah, and does this and does this also apply to i’m assuming it does but I just want to go further in the scenario does this also apply to like middle market management?
I don’t know software engineers You like kind of go up the ladder and it applies Yeah, absolutely. So the kind of data that we deal with and the kind of data that our clients, you know, get value from is directly relevant to jobs at all levels, entry level, hourly, all the way up to top executives.
Yeah. So you’ve been, I mean, you’ve been on this journey nine years, obviously it started you didn’t use this word, maybe it’s the wrong word rudimentary or very basic. Basic. Your, your first thesis was very basic. Now you’re, you know, nine years later building. I’m curious on like what the, what is the future of this look like for you?
Like how far can you push this? There’s always something next, right? So there’s, there’s the next in terms of how do we compete with what we have. Right. So how do we get, you know, more people using the data products that we provide more partners that are integrating our data into, into their applications, their platforms, their, you know, their services that they provide with what we have, and then there’s looking at, well, where are their adjacencies that we need to move into?
And, and the pace of that is fast. It’s not like, it’s not quite like application life cycles where you’ve got to plan like three versions ahead constantly, but it’s pretty fast. We’re, we’re thinking a couple versions down the road constantly. And that means new data sources, new territories that are covered, new ways to help people use.
Use our data all those things, new ways to combine data from multiple organizations to all of our benefits. Those are all the things that, you know, we’ve started doing and we’re going to grow in, in the way that we do them. Take me through kind of like the onboarding or just the process so that our listeners can get a feel for like what it’s like to work with WageScape.
So, you know, I’m, I’m an employer, I’m watching this interview or I’m listening to it. I’m driving the car and I’m like, okay, this sounds great. This sounds amazing. But like, is it going to be too, is it going to be complicated? Like, what does this look like? Take, take me through what it looks like for a new client.
Right. So. If, if you’re in the business of acquiring talent, or if you’re in the business of managing compensation we have applications that are directly relevant to you and they start with simple kind of business intelligence applications that allow you to say, I want to see what’s going on with hiring and competition and pay for this specific job in this specific market over this timeframe.
And then I want to compare it to. You know, some other comparison, maybe it’s a different company that’s hiring or whatever. We’ve got really powerful tools. You can actually see them on our website and try them out. For individuals, if you are in a company where you’ve got a really robust analytics capability already, you have analysts that have really strong tools and, and bring data sources in then, then.
You just work directly with us to, to bring our data into your environment. We work with you to figure out where are you going to get value from it? What’s the best configuration of it and what’s the easiest way for you to get it. And we make it really easy to work with us from a, from a technical standpoint.
If you’re in a different kind of business like it’s not just recruiting and pay. If you’re in the business of needing to understand how hiring signals signal or hiring behaviors, signal future business actions, future business potential. Like if you’re, you know, in the business of managing investments, in the business of evaluating financial risk, things like that.
Then it’s the same data platform and it’s the same ways to use it. But it’s just a very different use case. And so what is What about size of company? Like, is there a certain amount of employees? There’s some that like, where this makes sense, does it make sense? Like, what does that look like? Any company where they have either, they, they have a recruiter, like a full time recruiter or a portion of a At least a portion of an HR representatives time is spent on managing compensation, compensation can benefit from from our services.
And we’re priced, we’re priced accordingly. Yeah. So if you’re a small organization and have small needs, then you’d pay a small price, big organization with really big, sophisticated needs, then the. Price is higher, but the value is way higher too. Yeah. Yeah. No, I see. And I see that. And I’m, I’m just I think it’s exciting because the example that you kind of opened this conversation up with of like, yeah, if you’re going to buy, you know, some shares of, of Microsoft.
Based on a price from, you know, 15 months ago, it sounds absolutely ridiculous. So when you kind of connect that with, okay, well, if you’re using, you know, hiring data or data wage data from 15 months ago, and you could have, you know, up to the date, like type data, like, why would you go with anything else?
Right. Right. Right, and that’s, that’s the thing. There’s lots of different ways to look at pay data. There’s more types of data that we work with in terms of employment data and hiring and so forth, but specifically around pay. There’s lots of different types of data, but. But the quality of data that’s available now is, has really undergone a big shift.
And we’re a part of that shift. And every organization has an opportunity to adapt the way that they, they manage things for better competitive advantage when it comes to, comes to talent by bringing, you know, data sources like ours and data intelligence, like, you know, you know, wage intelligence like ours into how they manage things.
Amazing. Well, Cary, this has been I mean, I’ve learned a lot about what’s going on with, with data wages, the market. I mean, I, I’m sure my audience did as well. I just have to ask, I mean, what’s next, what’s next for you? What’s next for Wagescape? Let’s dream for a moment. So growth, growth is the number one thing.
And you know, like I said, it’s growth in terms of market share with what we have. So, you know, and it’s expanding into new markets. Both amazing. And if somebody was watching this or listening to this and they want to follow up and learn more about wage scape, how do they do that? It’s easy. Just go to wage scape.
com or you can reach me directly on LinkedIn. Perfect. And we’ll, and for everybody watching or listening to this, we’ll put all that information in the show notes. So you can just click on the links and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters. This is a daily show each and every day.
We’re bringing you new entrepreneurs, new executives, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along in your journey as well. So if that sounds interesting to you, we welcome you hit that subscribe or follow button because we sure would like to have you back. For it to listen to another episode and carry again.
Thank you so much for coming on. And I’m looking forward to this 10 year reunion, man, our 10, excuse me, 10 year anniversary that you have coming up, maybe we make it a reunion. I don’t know. You got, got to plan something for that. So that’s amazing. And congrats on your success. I’d be happy to come back on Adam.
I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you and your audience.