When I started doing compensation work in the 1990s, the only compensation data we used to market price jobs was the traditional salary surveys.
Traditional salary surveys are still published by a variety of firms ,but now there are more pay data sources employers can use.
1. Crowd sourced and/or self-reported pay data
2. Job offer pay data (from your ATS, for example)
3. Web scraped or job posting pay data
The challenges with these nontraditional compensation data sources include:
· Timing – When is the data captured/provided? When is it published? How often is it updated?
· Does it provide all the pay elements like base pay, short-term incentives, and long-term incentives?
· Is the method of collecting the data consistent and standardized year over year?
· Do I trust how the data is reviewed and how outliers are handled?
· The job posting data isn’t easy to interpret. Is it the full base pay range? Is it just part of the range for the job posted? There are general statements about incentives but often not a specific number or range provided by employers when they post a job opening.
· Is the employer’s job a good match to this job in the survey results? Is there a good job description provided by the survey publisher that I can compare the employer job to?
Often these new data sources are used to validate what is published in traditional salary surveys.
And no compensation data source is perfect.
The real challenge is knitting all these sources together into a cohesive and easy to understand story. And then using that summary (story) to determine what to recommend to the employer that balances:
· External competitiveness
· Internal equity and fairness
· Budget impact
· Transparency
· Alignment to business strategy and goals
Compensation work has become more complex over the years, and it will continue to become more challenging.
What other nontraditional pay data sources are you using?
What will be using in the future to benchmark jobs, skills, competencies, employees, etc.?
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