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Pay Research

As you would expect, a significant proportion of our projects involve market pay research.  This is because our customers want to ensure that they are paying their employees in line with their chosen market position e.g. market median plus 5%.

We work with our customers to identify the appropriate criteria on which to base this pay research.  These criteria include sector, organisation size, location, and functional activity. We then discuss potential comparator organisations with our customer.  Suitable benchmark organisations could be included for a variety of reasons ranging from organisations with similar funding structures (e.g. all member funded organisations) to organisations providing similar services (e.g. both IT providers).

Once we have agreed the relevant criteria and the comparators with our customer, we then obtain the salary data from the comparator organisations (if we don’t already have it) and extract pay levels from published salary surveys and our in-house database.  All of this pay data is individually assigned a job weight score (using analytical, factor based job evaluation and either the organisation’s own grading structure or the generic grading structure that has been used in the survey) so that our pay recommendations are based on job size rather than job titles.  This ensures that we have a robust sample of data that is specific to the organisation and reflects the market/location in which they operate.