Corporate Executive Board and Allen & Company LLC Make Strategic Investment in Real-Time Salary Data

Funding for PayScale, Inc. Signals Increasing Business and Consumer Need for Web-Based Compensation Source.

The use of the web to identify and track salary will only grow in the years and decades to come. With 47 million people every month using online job and recruiting sites, the potential market is significant

Seattle (PRWEB) July 10, 2007 -- PayScale, Inc., the largest real-time online compensation data source in the world for employers and individuals, today announced that it has closed an initial $8.8 million of a $10.3 million Series C financing round, led by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB). Joining in the investment is Allen & Company LLC, a New York City based investment firm, and all of PayScale's current investors: Trinity Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Fluke Venture Partners, and Buerk Dale Victor. A second close of the remaining $1.5 million will be announced in the next 60 days. James J. McGonigle, Non-Executive Chairman of the CEB Board, will join the PayScale Board of Directors.

This marks the first strategic investment for the Corporate Executive Board, which includes, among its other executive networks, the largest global network of Chief Human Resource Officers, since becoming a publicly-traded company in 1999. The CEB investment in PayScale is driven by an increasingly global demand for real-time, peer-to-peer information. PayScale is a leader in compensation information, possessing over 8 million unique salary profiles and patent-pending search matching technology that provides immediate and current compensation intelligence. In the 2006 CEB report, "Attracting and Retaining Critical Talent Segments", findings include that employees, peer-to-peer communications, are the most trusted source for potential new hires.

"The investment in PayScale initiates an important relationship for CEB, a powerful addition to our already-well-established and growing HR benchmarking database of now 3-million+ datapoints. Access to real-time salary information has become an important element of the HR Executive's arsenal as they compete in fast-moving talent markets," said Thomas L. Monahan, III, chief executive officer of the Corporate Executive Board. "PayScale's breadth and depth of real-time compensation information is a very unique asset for HR executives. CEB looks forward to contributing our world-leading analytic techniques and unique ability to deliver actionable, essential insight to executives and their enterprises in order to amplify significantly the value organizations receive from compensation data."

In an earlier announcement, CEB and PayScale unveiled specifics around their business partnership. CEB will now provide PayScale Professional, a web-based compensation data solution for the enterprise. PayScale Professional is PayScale's award-winning compensation data service for HR professionals and hiring managers and is a primary salary validator for more than 3,500 organizations worldwide.

Historically, the process of determining prevailing salary and wage information has been manual, arduous, and prone to error due to lack of detail defining the companies and the jobs being compared. For decades companies have worked with old methodologies, and have difficulty determining the market rates of employees other than on very broad scales. PayScale makes salary information available in real time, with an un-matched level of depth and accuracy.

PayScale has launched the concept of anonymously comparing your salary online - in detail - to other real people with similar individual and job characteristics (I.e., location, company type and size, job, experience, education, skills, and more.) Using an advanced search and proprietary matching technology, PayScale finds a relevant peer group from their data set that matches the user-provided job information. The system allows every user's job profile to be unique and relevant to his/her different job requirements, thus creating a level of accuracy that cannot be achieved with traditional methodologies.

"The use of the web to identify and track salary will only grow in the years and decades to come. With 47 million people every month using online job and recruiting sites, the potential market is significant," said Michael Metzger, chief executive officer, PayScale. "We are delighted by the continued support of our previous investors, and welcome the Corporate Executive Board and Allen & Company LLC into the PayScale business. Our investors, collectively, provide the company with world-class technological, operational, and global experience."

About Corporate Executive Board
The Corporate Executive Board Company (CEB) (Nasdaq/NM: EXBD) is a leading provider of best practices research and analysis focusing on corporate strategy, operations and general management issues. CEB provides its integrated set of services currently to more than 3,700 of the world's largest and most prestigious corporations, including over 80% of the Fortune 500. These services are provided primarily on an annual subscription basis and include best practices research studies, executive education seminars, customized research briefs and web-based access to the program content databases and decision support tools. The company is located in Washington DC. For more information, please visit http://www.executiveboard.com/contact+form

About PayScale
PayScale is a market leader in online compensation and benefit data for employers and individuals. With the world's largest database of individual employee compensation profiles, PayScale provides an immediate and precise snapshot of current market pay. PayScale's patent-pending real-time profiling technology collects and indexes employee pay attributes worldwide and makes this data available through its online search tools and salary reports at www.PayScale.com. PayScale was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in Seattle, Wash.

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