Salary.com Product in the Spotlight: Compensable Factors
Written by Stephan Duncan
August 22, 2019
We are constantly improving our award-winning CompAnalyst platform with new functionalities that are designed to help you get the right price, for the right job, every time. In this new series, we’ll be highlighting some of our recent enhancements, and demonstrating how they can help your organization navigate today’s rapidly evolving talent market.
Earlier this summer, we released our compensable factors functionality, built to help our customers tailor benchmark jobs to more accurately reflect their internal job descriptions. This new functionality illustrates the impact that certain pricing factors, including skills, education, and years of experience, can have on a job’s market price. By using this new functionality, CompAnalyst clients can now more accurately assess the market value of the exact job they’re looking to price, instead of relying on “close enough” job matches in traditional salary surveys.
What Is a Compensable Factor?
Compensable factors include skills, licenses, certifications, years of experience, educational requirements, working conditions, reporting structures, managerial responsibilities, and other factors that can impact the price of a job in a given pay market. Our HR-reported data on the pricing impacts of compensable factors adjustments allows our clients to tailor their pricing for the more than 15,000 unique job titles in our CompAnalyst Market Data database.
How Do Compensable Factors Impact the Job Price?
As you add, edit, and adjust compensable factors, our platform will recalculate the benchmark job’s original price, determining whether premiums (increases to the original base salary) or discounts (decreases to the original base salary) should be applied to the adjusted job's price based on your changes. The new adjusted base salary is determined by the compensable factors’ current value in the market.
For example, your organization might require Software Engineer I positions to know the Ruby on Rails programming language. In addition, you also might require these positions to have at least four years of experience instead of zero to two years. While the base 50th salary for the benchmark Software Engineer I position is $68,337, when you add the new skill and the additional years of experience to the job description and then recalculate the price, the job’s base 50th salary increases to $70,423 because of the market demand for the Ruby on Rails skill and software engineers with increased experience.
Why Would You Use Compensable Factors?
Pricing hot jobs and skills is one of the biggest challenges facing compensation and HR professionals today, yet skill-based pay premiums remain difficult to benchmark. In addition, many organizations have highly customized job descriptions for their unique jobs, further complicating their pricing. Our compensable factors functionality allows you to accurately price these unique jobs, customizing the individual job factors to reflect your specific organizational needs. This enables you to assess the true value of each job’s required skills and experience, rather than relying simply on “close enough” matches within traditional data sets.
Want to learn more about how our compensable factors functionality works? Book a demo of CompAnalyst today to see this feature in action.
Download our white paper to further understand how organizations across the country are using market data, internal analytics, and strategic communication to establish an equitable pay structure.
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