The summary below briefly highlights the key steps in the methodology behind Salary Wizard Professional.

1. Salary.com identifies the jobs most common and most important for our small business clients. We create job descriptors that summarize the key aspects of each job.

2. In addition to using our own data, 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 (sometimes in conjunction with industry groups or other third parties) and Salary.com makes sure each adheres to the standards set by WorldatWork (formerly the American Compensation Association).

   Also refer to the data source section for more information.

3. Salary.com's compensation consultants match our job descriptions to the most comparable jobs (if any) from each available data source. Each job must be matched to multiple survey sources to be published in any Salary.com premium product, including the Salary Wizard Professional.

4. Our compensation consultants create a composite view for each job, for each set of scopes. To do this, for each data point we take into account the statistical reliability, the robustness, and the effective date of the data. Our compensation consultants further correct the data for any industry, geography, or company size biases inherent in a given survey report.

5. For a reality check, Salary.com's compensation consultants may validate the data points by comparing them with other market indicators such as government data (e.g., the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

6. 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.

7. The compensation consultants identify those scopes for which data is insufficient. Manually, we identify those combinations that do or may reasonably be assumed to exist, but for which specific data is not available. For these jobs we use information on similar jobs or similar scopes to interpolate or extrapolate a best estimate of a reasonable market range. For each individual job title, our compensation consultants create a series of adjustment factors that reflect the relative impact of industry, geography, and company size have on the market pay for that job. During this process, if we identify a situation that is not possible (e.g., dentist in the media and hospitality industry), we report the salaries as "N/A" meaning "not applicable." See the data analysis section for more information.

8. The team updates the database every month to incorporate the most current information available and to reflect the general movement of salaries. As we identify and incorporate new surveys, we replace extrapolated market information with data based on the new market information.