Looking to Benchmark Pay?
Internet
A convenient way to retrieve labor market data is through the Internet, which has proven to be a natural medium for conducting and distributing survey data.
Internet compensation data comes in three forms:
- free salary sites
- online survey reports
- computer data banks
Keep in mind: There is no such thing as a free lunch!
Free Internet salary sites give labor market data by area and position but be careful...you get what you pay for.
The most popular sites provide data designed for the general employee, not the employer. This can put compensation professionals at a disadvantage, since they have to deal with employees asking for pay raises based upon this free, accessible, and typically inflated information. In general, free salary websites (also known as crowdsourced data) receive their revenue from the sale of advertising (not from the sale of surveys), leading some of them to inflate their data just to increase traffic.
There is a site, SalaryExpert.com, that offers free salary reports for over 45,000 job titles in 10,000+ locations, 1,100 industries, and 70 countries that is recommended.
What to Look for In a Survey
Be cautious of sites that do not provide sources, surveys, methodology and a standard error.
Here are some questions to consider before utilizing data from the Internet or free survey data.
- Is the data inflated to attract visits?
- Are jobs in your organization covered?
- Is data for your geographic area covered?
- Is the data self-reported
- Are data resources provided and documented?
- Is the methodology for salary calculations provided?
- Are reliability statistics, including a standard error provided?
- Is its data defensible in court?
Memory Jogger
Free salary websites are typically designed for: