The market compensation data in any Job Valuation Report is the same as the data Salary.com provides to all corporate clients, and is developed using the same methodology. Each job has been thoroughly researched and validated by Salary.com’s team of compensation consultants using practical standards for data collection, analysis, and validation that are widely accepted throughout the compensation profession. To customize the market data to an employer’s needs, Salary.com ‘s compensation consultants compare the job and employee traits, where specified, against those typical for the benchmark job. Based on the importance and reasonable value of each trait, Salary.com predicts where an employee with such traits may be expected to fall within the benchmark job’s market range. The result is the predicted pay range.
Where does the data come from?
The data in your Job Valuation Report represents Salary.com's copyrighted market price for this job. All pay figures are expressed in US dollars. Our team of certified compensation consultants establishes our market compensation data based on primary and secondary research and analysis, and a proprietary mathematical model.
- Salary.com identifies jobs to include in the database and creates job descriptors that summarize the key aspects of each job.
- Salary.com identifies and purchases the most current compensation surveys covering the targeted jobs. All of the surveys are published by reputable compensation data firms and Salary.com makes sure each adheres to the standards set by WorldatWork.
- Salary.com's compensation consultants match our job descriptions to the most comparable jobs from each available data source. Each job must be matched to multiple survey sources to be published.
- Our compensation consultants create a composite view for each job, for each set of scopes, and correct the data for any inherent biases.
- Salary.com's compensation consultants periodically validate the data points by comparing them with other market indicators.
- The Salary.com consultants' composite view is then a "best-of-the-best" analysis of the compensation market for each job for which the data is sufficient to report.
- The compensation consultants identify those scopes for which data is insufficient and interpolate or extrapolate a best estimate of a reasonable market range.
- The team updates the database every month to incorporate the most current information available and to reflect the general movement of salaries; therefore, the market data pertaining to the job you selected is current as of the month in which you purchased the report.
How is this different from the Salary Wizard's free initial answers?
The data in the Job Valuation Report is fully scoped. This means the underlying survey data for a given job has been segmented to reflect pay practices specific to various locations, company sizes, and industries. These are factors known to strongly affect pay and are essential when making professional salary decisions for a given job.
Further, the Employee version of the Job Valuation Report accounts for differences in estimated market value arising from personal attributes such as years of experience, performance, education, and other compensable factors known to have some influence on an individual's pay.
In contrast, the Salary Wizard's free answers are based on salary values from survey responses across all sizes of companies, all industry types, and all locations, and offer no personal customization. The Salary Wizard simply applies a general geographic adjustment factor based on the city or ZIP code specified in order to give users an initial sense of local market conditions and to give some confirmation that the correct job title and description have been selected.
To ensure comparability between the free and premium products, each Job Valuation Report includes a chart showing how differences in pay arise as data is scoped to reflect specific locations, company sizes, and industries.
