March 23, 2020

A solid way to establish confidence that you're paying your team competitively

Matt LeMaire, B.A., M.A.

Vice President, People & Operations

Peel Mutual Insurance (Insurance, 11-50 employees)

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use PayScale MarketPay to price our jobs and determine how we should be paying our employees. We currently use PS MP across the entirety of the organization to ensure that we maintain internal equity and keep pace with the market. As a smaller company, we often have to worry about how we can compete with larger players in the market. By obtaining data about the market rate for each role, we are able to develop a compensation package that will attract and retain high quality employees while allowing us to steadily increase total compensation over time with confidence that we are competitive.

Pros and Cons

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Updated data to ensure that we are keeping pace--you're not stuck with outdated data that some annual salary surveys provide.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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Return on Investment

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.

Alternatives Considered

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.

Support Rating

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!

Other Software Used

Workplace by Facebook, BambooHR, Calamari, Adobe Acrobat DC, Adobe Illustrator CC, Adobe Photoshop

Operating Systems	Unspecified
Mobile Application	No

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