Analyzing Salary Surveys

Jobs to Include in a Custom Survey

In this step, select the benchmark jobs for which you will gather data. A benchmark job is commonly found within most organizations and used to make pay comparisons, either within the organization or with comparable jobs outside the organization. Pay data for these jobs are readily available in published surveys.

Compensation surveys do not attempt to obtain information on all of an organization's jobs for the following reasons:

• Some jobs are unique to the organization and are unlikely to be found elsewhere.
• Many jobs are filled from the internal labor market and market data may not be needed.
• Compensation policy and practice in most organizations are based on a limited number of benchmark jobs.

Benchmark jobs, sometimes referred to as key jobs, are reference points in the salary structure.

In most custom compensation surveys, a limited number of benchmark jobs, 25 to 30, are chosen to represent the entire range of jobs. It is important to include benchmark jobs of value to all surveyed companies to ensure a sufficiently large survey population.

Organizations that place more emphasis on external competitiveness tend to survey a larger number of benchmark jobs as appropriate.

The more data that is collected and used, the greater the reliability of the results for compensation planning purposes.

Benchmark jobs are selected on a number of criteria. They should:

• include jobs that represent all departments, functions, career levels, and job levels
• be well-known in the external labor market
• be readily definable and relatively stable in content
• represent good reference points for the pay structure
• be well-known to managers and labor leaders
• not be jobs that are unique to one company alone

Using these criteria, the organization or the steering committee can choose the jobs to be surveyed.

If there are jobs that continually require recruitment or exhibit turnover problems, they should be included as benchmark jobs in the survey, too.