A solid way to establish confidence that you're paying your team competitively
Rating: 8 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
We use PayScale MarketPay to price our jobs and determine how we should be paying our employees. We currently use PS MP across the entirety of the organization to ensure that we maintain internal equity and keep pace with the market. As a smaller company, we often have to worry about how we can compete with larger players in the market. By obtaining data about the market rate for each role, we are able to develop a compensation package that will attract and retain high quality employees while allowing us to steadily increase total compensation over time with confidence that we are competitive.
Pros
- 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- Updated data to ensure that we are keeping pace--you're not stuck with outdated data that some annual salary surveys provide.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.
Cons
- 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
ML
Matt LeMaire, B.A., M.A.
Vice President, People & Operations in Human Resources at Peel Mutual Insurance (11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
3 years of experience