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WorkWingman — Salary & Diversity Signals (Plain Language)

Two more extra clues WorkWingman can show you about a job — same hard rule as the other job signals: only use information that's legally public, an API we're actually allowed to use, or read straight off a page you already opened yourself.

Clue 1 — What does this job actually pay?

The idea: before you spend an evening tailoring your resume, it helps to know roughly what a role like this actually pays — not one guess, but a few different, honestly-labeled numbers you can compare.

The sites everyone assumes we'd use — and why we don't (for free):

  • levels.fyi. Their own rules say flat out: no scraping, no bots, no automated downloads. They do sell an official paid API for exactly this kind of data, though — so we built the wiring for it (a labeled slot that's ready to go), but it stays switched off and returns nothing until someone actually pays for and configures that subscription. We're not going to fake having access we don't have.
  • Glassdoor. Even more locked down — they shut off free API access years ago, and now only sell it to big enterprise partners with no public way to even ask. There isn't a paid door we could leave unlocked for later, so we didn't build anything for it at all.

What we do instead — three legal, honest sources:

  1. What companies told the government they'd pay (H-1B visa filings). When a company sponsors someone for an H-1B visa, they're legally required to tell the Department of Labor exactly what they'll pay that role, at that location. The government publishes this data — it's public by law, the same information sites like h1bdata.info just make easier to search. It only covers roles that had a visa filing, but when it's there, it's a real number a real company really committed to paying.
  2. What the government's own wage survey says (BLS). The Bureau of Labor Statistics runs an official, free survey of what every occupation pays, broken down by metro area. It's exactly the kind of "typical salary for this job in this city" number you'd get from a salary site — except it's the government's own numbers, freely and legally available through their public API.
  3. What this specific company already told you. Several states — Colorado, California, Washington, New York, and more — now legally require companies to put a real pay range right on the job posting if you might be applying from one of those states, even for remote jobs. WorkWingman already opens and reads that posting for the title, description, and everything else — while it's there, it also picks out that pay range if the posting shows one.

What you'll see: up to three numbers, each clearly labeled with where it came from — the H-1B filing number, the government survey number, and the range this specific employer posted. We don't average them into one fake number, because they're answering slightly different questions ("what did a visa sponsor commit to pay," "what does this job typically pay across the industry," and "what is this specific employer offering") — seeing them side by side is more useful than blending them into a single misleading figure.

Honest caveats:

  • The H-1B number only exists for roles that actually had a visa filing — most jobs won't have one, and that's normal, not a bug.
  • The posted-range number only shows up if the company actually included a range in the posting — not every state requires it, and not every company complies even where it's required.
  • None of these numbers is "the" salary — they're three different honest data points, and you should read them that way.

Clue 2 — What does this company's workforce look like?

The idea: some people want to know, before applying, roughly how diverse a company's workforce is — for example, what percent identify as women, or as an underrepresented racial or ethnic group.

The honest truth: there's no legal, up-to-date, bulk source for this the way there is for salary. We looked. Here's what actually exists:

  1. Companies that choose to publish their own numbers. Some larger companies voluntarily publish an annual "diversity report" with real figures. When they do, that's a legitimate, citable number straight from the company itself.
  2. Old government data for federal contractors, released after a lawsuit. Companies that do a lot of business with the federal government have to file demographic reports every year. Some of that data has been released publicly — but only after years of legal fights, only for companies with big federal contracts, only as one big company-wide number (not broken down by job or city), and often years out of date by the time it comes out.

That's it. There's no ongoing, free, bulk "here's every company's current diversity numbers" source — most companies simply don't publish anything, and the little bit of official government reporting that does exist is, as of this writing, at risk of being scaled back rather than expanded. So WorkWingman doesn't pretend otherwise: instead of trying to crawl the internet guessing which page might be a real diversity report (unreliable, and honestly not something we could verify), it keeps a small, hand-checked list of companies where someone has actually gone and confirmed the company's own published number and saved a link to it.

What you'll see: for a handful of companies where we've curated a verified number, you'll see the percentage(s) that company itself published, with a link and the year it's from. For every other company — which will be most of them — you'll simply see nothing for this, and that means "we haven't verified a number for this company," not "this company has no diversity."

The line we won't cross: we're not going to scrape random "diversity report" pages across the web and hope they're accurate, and we're not going to guess a number for a company that hasn't published one. If that's ever tempting, it's a sign to stop — same principle as every other signal in this app.