Vault.com is a career services site that provides a number of services for free, including employee comment and surveys, as well as comparison of companies in the same industry.

I was referred to vault.com by my career services center and other career websites as a good place to look up salary information and learn about companies. When I was trying to change jobs (to go from one Investment Bank to another) a couple of years ago, I purchased a three-month gold membership to the Vault. The Gold membership allows you to read the results and comments of all the employee surveys (most of these are blocked for the free membership)

The problem I had with the site is that the quality of the employee surveys were low. The reported salaries varied widely (from the very high to the very low) for the same job, and seemed to me, in retrospect, to be highly inaccurate. Additionally, most of the surveys were brief, and seemed to be written by largely disgruntled workers.

Unfortunately, I think relying on your network of people for this sort of information is still the way to go. vault.com can't get you much, and it's certainly not worth the $45 I paid for it.