February through April is typically when the major consulting survey houses open their surveys for participation. Because the results are typically either 1) only available to participants, or 2) available to non-participants at a greatly inflated price, you will want to consider which and how many surveys you want to complete.
First and foremost, I recommend NOT using free data on the internet. It’s worth exactly what you pay for it. Your compensation program should have a policy to only use professionally prepared and vetted surveys. More than likely you will have someone come to you and say “My neighbor has the same job I do and he gets paid $5,000 more a year than I do.” That may well be true. The neighbor may also have sub-par benefits, no incentive plan, be a long-term nephew of the owner, etc. The correct response to this is we can’t conduct a cohesive compensation program with unconfirmed data points of individuals. You should also not rely on websites that offer free compensation rates for a given title if you go in and put in YOUR pay for that title. Matching a title, with no idea if the responsibilities are the same, is irresponsible compensation work. More so, you don’t know if the person who entered their data included their overtime, bonus, worked full time or part time, etc. or perhaps enhanced their own data. Good compensation practitioners use only third party aggregated data from a trusted source. It’s actually illegal for an organization to conduct their own salary survey, and solicit wage information from their competitors. Your best data and legally appropriate source is professionally published salary surveys.
First and foremost, I recommend NOT using free data on the internet. It’s worth exactly what you pay for it. Your compensation program should have a policy to only use professionally prepared and vetted surveys. More than likely you will have someone come to you and say “My neighbor has the same job I do and he gets paid $5,000 more a year than I do.” That may well be true. The neighbor may also have sub-par benefits, no incentive plan, be a long-term nephew of the owner, etc. The correct response to this is we can’t conduct a cohesive compensation program with unconfirmed data points of individuals. You should also not rely on websites that offer free compensation rates for a given title if you go in and put in YOUR pay for that title. Matching a title, with no idea if the responsibilities are the same, is irresponsible compensation work. More so, you don’t know if the person who entered their data included their overtime, bonus, worked full time or part time, etc. or perhaps enhanced their own data. Good compensation practitioners use only third party aggregated data from a trusted source. It’s actually illegal for an organization to conduct their own salary survey, and solicit wage information from their competitors. Your best data and legally appropriate source is professionally published salary surveys.