Want to know how much your colleagues earn?

Are you interested in knowing how much other people working alongside you are making without asking them directly or in discovering what your earning potential might be elsewhere?

Well here in France you can - thanks to a site launched at the end of March.

JobFact is the brainchild of its founder Julien Recoing who, according to the French website Rue89, said that its goal was to provide human resources information on two levels - for both employees and companies.

"We started out with the premise that when someone's looking for a job they want to know more about what the company has to offer," he said.

"What we ask is that our members provide a balanced view of the company they work for; the positive and negative aspects."

Where JobFact differs from two other sites in France that have been operational for a year now, Notetonentreprise.com and Cotetaboite.com, is that it allows users to go a step further in "rating" the company they work for - namely by revealing how much they earn.

The principle is simple and as with the other sites its all done "anonymously".

It's free to sign up, which is what you'll have to do if you want to have anything more than a very general overview of what others are earning.

And when you register, you're required either to reveal your salary or leave an evaluation of the company you work for.

The site already has 1,600 members

But as Rue89 points out there's something of an inbuilt contradiction in what the site is setting out to do and the tools it currently has available.

And that is to give reliable information while guaranteeing the anonymity of those providing it; anonymity which makes checking the authenticity of potentially exaggerated claims difficult.

It's something that Recoing says is being addressed with editors able to pinpoint discrepancies that they feel might appear in submissions made.

Perhaps it's an idea that'll catch on, even if openly discussing take-home pay is something of a taboo here in France, where on the whole work colleagues don't talk about how much they earn.

It's not really the "done thing" and smacks of the somewhat vulgar as if mentioning how much you make is tantamount to bragging.

But with figures released on Wednesday by the Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (French national institute for Statistics and Economic studies, INSEE) revealing that around 50 per cent of households live on less than €2,260 each month, maybe there'll be fair few out there "interested" in finding out just how their salaries compare with others within their own companies or doing a similar job elsewhere.

Or maybe not.