If you have a large employee base and you are trying to remain competitive from a compensation perspective, this tool is well suited to help you accomplish this goal. If you are not a comp expert, they have experts on hand that can help you through projects or just answer basic questions.
If you have someone in your organization well-versed in compensation and compensation analysis, PS MP is a great fit and they will be able to onboard and leverage it very quickly. Moreover, if you have roles within your organization that are fairly standard and akin to similar roles in other organizations, you will get a lot out of the majority of matches that PS MP suggests. However, if you've made your roles a little bit more nuanced or "outside of the box" you may have difficulty finding a sufficient match and have to make concessions. If you are in a region where PS MP might not provide enough data, you may need to do a bit of extra leg-work and analysis on your own to settle on where your pay ranges and the like should be. Given the cost of PS MP, it's worth considering based on your workforce and your commitment to compensation analysis and the conversations around it whether it's truly going to provide adequate ROI.
PayScale has been great for our organization for benchmarking market salaries and wages for our positions.
The service was great as well, in that we were able to send our job descriptions over to have our jobs matched with the market.
The market reports have been extremely helpful and are easy to understand, and being able to see a breakdown between total cash, base salary, and bonus has been great.
Detailed view of the market rates for roles within the organization provides the ability to pay our employees at our chosen rate with confidence.
Updated data to ensure that we are keeping pace--you're not stuck with outdated data that some annual salary surveys provide.
The market available for analysis are robust, and we're not simply looking at a single city, region, or country. You can usually get as grand or as granular as you like in reviewing available data.
Pre-recorded webinars on product updates would be great. I know they offer webinars, but many times they do not work into my schedule so I miss them. If they had a section on the site for training on product updates or new features that I could view on my own time I think would help me utilize the tool even better.
The ability to add-in or take away elements in the EE comp report. Some things are just not relevant to a company. I know a new release recently came out on the EE comp report and I am not a fluent with it as I once was (this is where the pre-recorded webinar or a learning byte would be helpful), but previously there were 3 versions of the EE comp report you could use. If I could add-in or drop-out sections to customize it to my company it would be nice.
There is a bit of a learning curve--if you're looking to get others involved who are not fluent in compensation data and analysis, it can be complicated and involved. It could benefit from additional tips and walkthroughs for newer users outside of the support that PayScale provides through your designated PS employee/account manager.
Being a Canadian company, the data isn't always as robust as it is for American companies. Larger cities are almost always represented and while you can often get data for the smaller areas, the data is not sufficient enough to always provide the best confidence (e.g. 5.0 reports vs. lower rated ones).
It does not work for every job, and you may find that you need to stretch definitions a bit as you may have roles that don't fix the exact mold that they are closest to in PayScale. This is especially true in insurance, where the role of underwriter or claims adjuster may differ significantly based on the organization's business.
Never had any issues with customer support as they are very responsive. The system is very reliable, therefore, we rarely interact with their customer support.
Support is great as PayScale provides you with a dedicated staff member similar to Account Manager that helps ensure you stay on track and you get what you need out of the product. Additionally, onboarding support is provided where needed, and you never feel as though you're not close to the support you need. PayScale support is great!
First of all, PayScale was by far the easiest tool to navigate and provided us with appropriate data. We had been working with Mercer for all of our compensation studies so the partnership with Mercer was attractive to us as well. I felt like I didn't get the best customer service with the other two products when we were in the decision stage. There was some pressure tactics that I didn't appreciate, and some unprofessionalism that seemed like red flags to me when discussing entering into a long-term contract. Not only was PayScale the best user interface for us, but they had our best interests in mind and were very professional to work with.
We haven't used any similar products, as the organization previously relied on salary surveys completed within a group of similar companies and market surveys. The downside of such surveys was the limited or not relevant datasets and the timing of them as they did not keep pace with the market and were always essentially 6-12 months behind the curve.
We wanted to ensure that we were able to support our compensation strategy and decisions with verifiable and trusted market data, and Payscale Insight has allowed us to do that. Now, compensation conversations with employees are more effective and transparent, enhancing our engagement and retention.
Additionally, we have been able to better train our managers to understand our compensation philosophy and how we can leverage it to improve performance and set effective goals for our employees.
Payscale Insight has become our main source for compensation data, eliminating the significant time investment it would previously take to bring it all together, review and make a decision.
Positive: Ability to better understand where our pay is relative to the market and ensure that we are paying competitively and attracting the best possible talent.
Positive: We can have more informed compensation conversations with staff about their pay and why we pay the way we do. We can define our compensation philosophy and build a plan to move forward and ensure we keep staff informed.
Neutral Impact: While PS MP can be robust for certain jobs, using it as a unified platform within the organization is not without its challenges as some jobs just don't quite fit the data provided and we need to make some concessions. While there are benefits to the data, the additional work and less confidence makes those benefits a bit of a wash in the end.
Negative: There has been no negative impact of using PS MP overall to this point.
