Salary and Pay Benchmarking

The benefits of salary benchmarking

Salary and pay benchmarking is a way to determine the market value of a given role or job title. It provides employers with objective and independently sourced salary information to help their decision making on employee pay packages and executive pay in their organisation.

Through a salary survey or other source of salary data, remuneration professionals can match internal jobs and their descriptions to similar jobs and descriptions within their market to identify pay rates and conduct a salary comparison.

Knowing what your competitors are paying for certain roles can help your organisation become more competitive in order to attract and retain talent.

What does the salary benchmarking process involve?

Salary benchmarking is a detailed process, deploying a scientific method to achieve reliable information for salary comparison. It involves job analysis, the identification of salary survey data and the extraction and interpretation of that data.

We are fully independent and not tied to in-house surveys when advising you. We select salary surveys which are sector or function focused, using multi-source surveys to validate our findings.

We provide salary data on a sector basis or by job family (groupings of jobs with similar characteristics). Our analysis is based on reliable job matching, and will take into account company size and complexity, and revenue and market capitalisation. We examine key areas of reward and remuneration, from basic salaries to cash bonuses, share awards or long-term incentive plan (LTIP) payments.

A balance of data and judgement

A salary benchmarking tool does not negate the need for judgement or negotiation when deciding on pay packages. However, it does helps your organisation’s executives or remuneration committee to compare salaries objectively.

Decision making can then take into account a role’s market rate as well as any considerations relating to a job holder personally. Striking a good balance between these two considerations can help with competitive pay setting, pay progression and bonus decisions.

Specialist independent consultants

Whether you are looking to recruit or simply review your market pay positioning, our reward consultants can help you make data-driven decisions on your employee remuneration.

We can help you identify your positioning, read the situation and provide insight and understanding. Our independence means that we will always use the most appropriate available cost-effective survey data.

In addition, we offer benefits benchmarking services to help organisations remain competitive with their offering, including flexible benefits and voluntary benefit plans. We also work hand-in-hand with benefits consultants to design, develop, implement and manage benefits programmes.