It's not easy to figure job worth, but here are some places to start

What compensation level should I be looking for? How much am I worth in the job market?" Those are among the top questions job seekers ask me. And they are often frustrated by my reply: There are no pat answers.

If the labor market had the transparency and liquidity of the stock market, we could price ourselves in open trading. But the labor market is highly inefficient, more like a real estate market.

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Buyers and sellers - employers and workers - have trouble finding each other, and once they do, they have limited and usually imperfect information about each other. Assets - jobs and skills - are unique, local and difficult to value.

Demand is inelastic. Search and switching costs are high, and unlike securities markets, the labor market has no market maker to create liquidity. Salary survey tools like salary.com are too broad to be of much use.

What to do? One valid approach is to identify similar jobs (comparable firm and department; same industry, function, level and region) held by people with skills and work experience similar to yours. Then find out what those jobs pay. If you can unearth even a few data points, they will be more relevant to you than any salary survey. But it's a lot easier said than done. And the process becomes even more complicated if you are contemplating a career change rather than progressing along a linear job path.

But it's not hopeless. You can get a pretty good sense of how an employer would "price" you by considering the employer's structural constraints, your own prior compensation and the local job market. And then you can have an impact on those factors by articulating your own strong value proposition.

Structural constraints: Large companies typically have a system of job levels and salary bands. They seek to hire new employees at the midpoint of a salary band or below, so the hire will have room for an annual raise or two within the job level before coming up for promotion.

Smaller firms may not have salary band structures, but they still aim to avoid wide disparities among employees doing similar jobs at similar levels. If an employer's compensation expectations for a position are way below yours, try to persuade the employer to reclassify the job as a more senior role because of the value you'll create for the organization (more on that below).

But even if your job is internal, there are ways to define your contribution in tangible terms. For example, a compliance officer can articulate value in terms of regulatory fines avoided (cost reductions), turnaround time on approvals (service improvements) and corporate reputation upheld (intangible benefits). The more effectively you make this case, the more likely an employer will be to step up with better compensation.

We all want to maximize our income. But often money isn't everything. If you do an ace negotiating job and become the highest paid of your peers, you may be the most vulnerable to layoff if you or the company runs into trouble. And no amount of money will make you like your job if you really don't. Ultimately, I like to think that if we find the work we love and commit ourselves to being the best at it, the rewards - financial and otherwise - will follow.