# LinkedIn Salary: A System for Secure Collection and Presentation of Structured Compensation Insights to Job Seekers

## TL;DR

LinkedIn Salary is a secure system designed to collect and present compensation insights to job seekers, addressing privacy challenges and providing reliable salary data from over 1.5 million members.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a novel system for privacy-preserving collection and presentation of salary data, with a detailed architecture and real-world deployment insights.

## Key findings

- Demonstrated effective privacy-preserving data collection methods
- Analyzed tradeoffs between privacy and data modeling accuracy
- Collected over 1.5 million compensation submissions in a year

## Abstract

Online professional social networks such as LinkedIn have enhanced the ability of job seekers to discover and assess career opportunities, and the ability of job providers to discover and assess potential candidates. For most job seekers, salary (or broadly compensation) is a crucial consideration in choosing a new job. At the same time, job seekers face challenges in learning the compensation associated with different jobs, given the sensitive nature of compensation data and the dearth of reliable sources containing compensation data. Towards the goal of helping the world's professionals optimize their earning potential through salary transparency, we present LinkedIn Salary, a system for collecting compensation information from LinkedIn members and providing compensation insights to job seekers. We present the overall design and architecture, and describe the key components needed for the secure collection, de-identification, and processing of compensation data, focusing on the unique challenges associated with privacy and security. We perform an experimental study with more than one year of compensation submission history data collected from over 1.5 million LinkedIn members, thereby demonstrating the tradeoffs between privacy and modeling needs. We also highlight the lessons learned from the production deployment of this system at LinkedIn.