A Compensation Survey Rant

It's a given that the preponderance of free Internet salary data of questionable origin hasn't made life easier for the typical HR or compensation professional, striving (uphill, in many cases) to enforce quality standards for their pay information.  But, honestly, many of the traditional publishers of pay surveys aren't helping matters much.

Take the case of one client of mine, trying to work with her IT Director to select survey matches from a number of well-regarded IT compensation surveys.  The IT Director pushes for the free online data, because although it reveals little to nothing about the source of and methodology for its information, it comes with very detailed and up-to-date job descriptions.  And because the parallel job description in the professionally published (and relatively expensive) compensation survey (for a Programmmer/Analyst) reads like this:

Develops detailed specifications including card layouts, program descriptions, decision tables, etc.

Card layouts?  Are you kidding me?  Think maybe your job descriptions could use a little updating?

Or... let's talk about survey job titles, and let's talk about the title "secretary".  How many of your organizations still use that title to describe administrative support roles?  Yes, I know that many of the duties and responsibilities are still the same, but do you want to have the conversation with the Special Assistant to the EVP - or his boss - and explain that titles don't matter and he's really an executive secretary for job benchmarking purposes?  Me neither.

If traditional survey providers intend to hold onto their edge and their customer base, a more proactive stance toward keeping their titles and descriptions (the core of their offering) current and relevant might be in order.  Complacency like this creates consequences. 

Just saying. 

Comments

[Ryan Johnson]

Ann - I certainly see your point, and we do hear similar grumbles occasionally from our members. The good news is that some of the survey data providers are working to get better.

Case in point: WorldatWork has been trying for a couple of years to get a common long term incentive (LTI) valuation methodology across a number of survey providers in order to give practitioners an apples-to-apples comparison of LTI values.

We are making progress; several vendors have stepped forward to work with us to implement the common methodology we've developed with practitioners. I think it's going to happen in the 2012-2013 cycle.

More information about our LTI initiative here: www.worldatwork.org/LTI

Ryan Johnson, VP Publishing & Community, WorldatWork

[Ann Bares]

Ryan:

I imagine you do hear this as well. I hear it a lot - this is really a vent on behalf of my clients.

There are some very high quality, highly dedicated survey providers out there who clearly invest in keeping their products fresh and up to date. This rant is not directed at them; its a tough business and we all appreciate their efforts and the superior products they provide. But there are others who appear to have decided to just coast out as far and long as they can. Perhaps those are simply business decisions in a tough environment, but they sure don't make it easy for people who are still participating in and purchasing their surveys.

There is an undeniable churn happening in the world of surveys. Jim Brennan wrote an interesting post about it at the Cafe-

http://www.compensationcafe.com/2011/04/where-have-all-the-salary-surveyors-gone.html

WorldatWork's LTI valuation initiative is an interesting venture, one that I know many are watching with hope that it will lead to consistent and comparable methodologies and data. Thanks for sharing the information about it here - and for your comment!