Market pricing 100, 500, or more jobs is a grind. It is slow and deliberate work, but the data ultimately tells a story.
Employers: Are you paying too much? Are you paying too little? Where do you need to spend money? How much should your budget be for pay changes going forward?
The market pricing of the jobs depends on well written job descriptions. Reading hundreds of job descriptions and then using that understanding to choose matches from salary surveys can be viewed as tedious. Or it can be done with curiosity and a focus on learning.
How can AI help with this work?
AI is now being used in some software to do the first draft of this market pricing work. In my experience, AI’s suggested market pricing matches are right about 50% of the time. The quality of the AI decision depends on the complexity of the jobs and the quality of the employer’s job descriptions.
What AI can’t do yet is go deeper and ask questions based on experience and curiosity without a prompt.
Curiosity questions sound like this:
1. How do this job and department interact with this other work group?
2. Who is making the final decision? Describe the stakeholders and the interaction needed to get feedback and buy in before the decision is made.
3. When does the employee performing Job A go to their manager for feedback or guidance? How often does that happen? Is that normal for someone in this job or this employee new to the role?
4. How can you have two departments (or jobs) with the same purpose?
5. How can one person do all that is written in the job description? It seems like more than a full-time job.
6. Why does this job report to HR instead of Finance?
7. There is a mix of tactical and strategic work in this job. Why isn’t the tactical work being delegated to a direct report?
8. What is the impact if this employee doesn’t do their job well? How will it impact the department, function, and company? Will customers be impacted? How will other departments or employees within the company be impacted?
In the one-on-one interaction between a manager or employee doing the work and HR/Compensation, understanding, rapport, trust, and alignment is developed. There is value in having conversations.
Based on the answers to these curiosity questions, an experienced HR/Compensation professional can align matches from salary surveys to the job level and responsibilities.
It is this fine tuning of the survey matches and understanding of all the jobs, reporting relationships, and how the work gets done that is nuanced and necessary to have trust in the outcomes of the market pricing process.
AI is good for some tasks. But as humans we need to connect emotionally, and we like stories.
Use the market pricing data and analysis to tell the stories that help your leaders make smart pay related decisions.
Use AI but don’t try to use it for the relationship aspects of your job. AI can’t replace the ability to connect authentically and empathetically with your employees, customers, and other key stakeholders.
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