Salary Surveys

Salary surveys must be carefully constructed to ensure that the data gathered are reliable and valid. Salary surveys provide a systematic way to collect information about wages in the external labor market.
Managers can either conduct their own surveys or purchase survey data from a number of different sources, including professional organizations and human resources consulting firms. If you decide to purchase data, it is important to ask a lot of questions about the process used to collect the data, including the types of organizations included and the jobs analyzed.
Typically, salary survey data will come from companies in the same industry. For many jobs, it is also important to collect data from companies in other industries that might be competing with you for employees. The data should also come from the appropriate geographic labor market, which can be local, regional, national, or global, depending on the type of job.
Salary surveys should collect data for an organization’s benchmark jobs because it would be too expensive and time-consuming to try to collect data for every job in the company. Plus, there will be jobs in your company for which there are no comparable jobs in other organizations.