PayScale MarketPay is a compensation survey data aggregator that supports merit and structure modeling, report writer, and pricing wizard.
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PayScale Payfactors
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Payfactors, now part of PayScale, provides three data sources to help organizations quickly respond to a changing talent market and the technology for organizations of all sizes to create more equitable and transparent pay practices.
If you have someone in your organization well-versed in compensation and compensation analysis, PS MP is a great fit and they will be able to onboard and leverage it very quickly. Moreover, if you have roles within your organization that are fairly standard and akin to similar roles in other organizations, you will get a lot out of the majority of matches that PS MP suggests. However, if you've made your roles a little bit more nuanced or "outside of the box" you may have difficulty finding a sufficient match and have to make concessions. If you are in a region where PS MP might not provide enough data, you may need to do a bit of extra leg-work and analysis on your own to settle on where your pay ranges and the like should be. Given the cost of PS MP, it's worth considering based on your workforce and your commitment to compensation analysis and the conversations around it whether it's truly going to provide adequate ROI.
With their multiple compensation databases and the ability to quickly navigate and explore market matches, I can trust that the data is accurate and up-to-date and that I can confidently stand behind my recommendations after doing my in-the-box Payfactors work. PayScale is a company that continues to grow and develop by leaps and bounds , so getting onboard with them now is still essentially the ground floor of something incredible.
Detailed view of the market rates for roles within the organization provides the ability to pay our employees at our chosen rate with confidence.
Updated data to ensure that we are keeping pace--you're not stuck with outdated data that some annual salary surveys provide.
The market available for analysis are robust, and we're not simply looking at a single city, region, or country. You can usually get as grand or as granular as you like in reviewing available data.
There is a bit of a learning curve--if you're looking to get others involved who are not fluent in compensation data and analysis, it can be complicated and involved. It could benefit from additional tips and walkthroughs for newer users outside of the support that PayScale provides through your designated PS employee/account manager.
Being a Canadian company, the data isn't always as robust as it is for American companies. Larger cities are almost always represented and while you can often get data for the smaller areas, the data is not sufficient enough to always provide the best confidence (e.g. 5.0 reports vs. lower rated ones).
It does not work for every job, and you may find that you need to stretch definitions a bit as you may have roles that don't fix the exact mold that they are closest to in PayScale. This is especially true in insurance, where the role of underwriter or claims adjuster may differ significantly based on the organization's business.
Support is great as PayScale provides you with a dedicated staff member similar to Account Manager that helps ensure you stay on track and you get what you need out of the product. Additionally, onboarding support is provided where needed, and you never feel as though you're not close to the support you need. PayScale support is great!
We haven't used any similar products, as the organization previously relied on salary surveys completed within a group of similar companies and market surveys. The downside of such surveys was the limited or not relevant datasets and the timing of them as they did not keep pace with the market and were always essentially 6-12 months behind the curve.
I continue to use both CompAnalyst and Payfactors simultaneously and they both have many pros and few cons. PayScale seems to have more advanced capabilities and has more robust user-provided tweaking and cutting-edge features. The access to multiple databases is also a major benefit. While the look and feel of Payfactors seems more "21st century" than CompAnalyst, I have to say that CompAnalyst has some very intuitive features, like the ability to select many matches, add them to a list, and then export the lot of them in a single Excel file, that I do enjoy and that I don't believe Payfactors can match. That would be one drawback, however this doesn't really affect the end results, which are incredible, it just changes the path to get there a little bit.
Positive: Ability to better understand where our pay is relative to the market and ensure that we are paying competitively and attracting the best possible talent.
Positive: We can have more informed compensation conversations with staff about their pay and why we pay the way we do. We can define our compensation philosophy and build a plan to move forward and ensure we keep staff informed.
Neutral Impact: While PS MP can be robust for certain jobs, using it as a unified platform within the organization is not without its challenges as some jobs just don't quite fit the data provided and we need to make some concessions. While there are benefits to the data, the additional work and less confidence makes those benefits a bit of a wash in the end.
Negative: There has been no negative impact of using PS MP overall to this point.
Increased capacity to provide accurate and robust compensation analyses
Ability to compare and contrast compensation schema between Payfactors and other databases.
Access to an enormous database of help documents and lux pdfs regarding pay philosophies, compensation concepts, market developments, etc. Educational resources are phenomenal.
