Reliable compensation benchmarks help to attract, hire, and engage top talent for critical jobs in your organization.  Throughout the year, ERI adds new jobs to the Salary Assessor by integrating standardized job descriptions into our compensation survey data collection process and analytics.  In addition to current subscribers submitting requests to include a new job, ERI conducts on-going comprehensive analysis of global job boards and labor statistics and monitors changes in occupational structures to expand the list of new jobs added to our compensation analytics.

These are the two most common approaches to benchmarking a new job:

  • Commission a consulting firm to do a custom survey, which can take 1 to 6 months to complete and have associated fees.
  • Reach out to your compensation analytics partner and request that your job be added. This generally requires 6 to 18 months and typically has no additional fee.

Reliable compensation benchmarks begin with standardized job descriptions.  All ERI descriptions are created in house by a team of analysts. The goal is to accurately describe occupations in a manner that is consistent.  These descriptions are standardized based on job content data collected from many sources.

ERI’s standard operating procedures (SOPs) for job descriptions outline the writing process.  All analysts are trained based on this procedure, which improves consistency. The language and terminology to describe occupations are standardized, facilitating the robust semantic search of ERI job description data when using the Salary Assessor.  Most organizations also have a structured process for their internal job descriptions.

Before ERI is able to write new job descriptions, it is necessary to collect data on the content of the jobs in question.  ERI uses two data sources to provide that information: job boards and job analyses.  The data from job boards provide meaningful insight into labor markets with over one million descriptions each year.  ERI’s job analysts study job content data for standard terminology.  By doing so, they identify information on the common language used in the description of various occupations.  During data scrubbing, the analysts also examine individual descriptions to identify common themes.  The analysis team makes sense of the data collected and compiles this information in a manner that is accurate and consistent.

As part of the on-going research, we reach out to networks of HR and total rewards professionals, academic colleagues, and professional associations, while also participating in panel discussions with domain experts in the field of compensation benchmarking.  These interactions help to validate compensation analytics, derive new hypotheses to test, and, most importantly, have a dialogue about the business realities impacting jobs and occupations.

As a result of collecting and analyzing job content for decades, we have determined there are approximately 1,200 verbs that are used in job descriptions, and these verbs have a tendency to cluster around specific types of jobs (e.g., Directors are more likely to “direct”).  These verb clusters are included in our job description writing procedures and standardize the language that is used in our descriptions.  Currently, the Salary Assessor has over 7,000 positions that can be benchmarked and over 1,500 new benchmark jobs under review for addition to our compensation analytics.

Recently, there were 48 benchmark jobs added to the Salary Assessor reflecting various industry sectors and occupations.  The occupation, Medical and Health Services Managers, had over ten jobs added.  For three critical job functions in most organizations, Customer Relationship Management, Data Integration, and Data Analytics, several jobs were added.

The combination of procedures, data, and skilled professionals creates a reliable job description library that is the basis for HR and total rewards practitioners to consistently interpret jobs across companies, geographic areas, and industries.  ERI’s diligence in data collection and analysis results in robust and reliable compensation analytics not available elsewhere.  ERI continues to enhance its benchmarking solutions to meet the evolving demands of subscribers.  For more information about benchmark jobs and compensation analytics, give us a call today at 800-627-3697, and one of our Subscriber Services team members will be available to assist you.