Can the Internet Help You Hit the Salary Mark? - online salary surveys

Workforce, Jan, 2001 by Susan J. Marks

Like many of his counterparts at smaller companies, Rodgers counts on multiple surveys. He likes Hay and Towers Perrin because, he says, both have quality organizations that put the same effort into their Internet databases as in their published reports. Also, different consultants seem to have better approaches to different aspects of the market. Rodgers likes Hay for the flexibility in allowing a user to slice and dice the database. He can select a particular job, then pull up data on a single industry or multiple industries by geographic locations or company sizes and more. He uses the Towers Perrin surveys to focus on management analysis. Another Towers Perrin database survey, for example, actually helps him to look at whole job families like Air Products' finance family. The survey compares entry-level, career mid-level, and high-level individual contributors.

Rodgers is a bit wary of ad hoc salary surveys from many professional organizations that are published on the Web and appear on the surface to be fairly authoritative. "You can get a lot of free information from the Internet, but you don't always get a very good explanation of the approaches that they have taken to compile the data and what they've done to ensure quality control."

And the surveys are just one aspect of setting competitive salaries. Other factors include total compensation packages in line with Air Products' business strategies, as well as trends inside and outside the industry.

The biggest advantage of using the Internet in the entire process, says Rodgers, is the time savings. He doesn't have the time to dig through binders of information and do manual analysis. And in the time it would take to contact a consultant for ad hoc market pricing requests, he can log on to the database and extract the data himself. He's also looking at broader outsourcing of the process. But even if that were to happen, some internal work would still have to be done for a clear understanding of what a job at Air Products entails, and how it compares with a survey benchmark job. Rodgers says: "You want to be sure you are talking apples and apples."

Susan J. Marks is a freelance writer based in Denver.

What To Look For in a Salary Survey

World at Work, a nonprofit industry organization that is the former American Compensation Association, offers a few suggestions for checking out salary survey data:

* Make sure the surveys you use match the correct labor market and job category. Don't rely on job titles alone.

* How many sources are appropriate for your needs? Using a number of survey sources helps avoid any particular bias of a single source.

* Get management's support for using survey data so that time and effort are not wasted.

* Assess why you want the survey data. That includes which jobs need to be listed and the appropriate labor markets, both geographically and by industry.

* Use reputable sources to find surveys. There are companies that specialize in cataloguing salary survey sources and maintaining information about them.