Chapter 11: How to Find, Select, and Evaluate Pay Surveys to Meet Your Organization’s Needs

Source: Reprinted from Salary Survey Guidebook: Finding and Evaluating Compensation and Benefits Data. Copyright 1998 by American Management Association and American Compensation Association. Used with the permission of the publisher, American Management Association International, New York, NY. All rights reserved. http://www.amanet.org.

Pay surveys are available to employers in ever increasing quantities and forms as a result of advancements in information technology. Their increased availability, however, is both a blessing and a curse. On the positive side, it is much easier for organizations to price their jobs relative to the market. On the negative side, however, wide-scale availability can lead to the careless selection of market data. Inappropriate data selection can be as dangerous as too little data in pricing jobs in the marketplace.