The Anatomy of a Job Title: How LaborIQ Builds Accurate Compensation Benchmarks

What does LaborIQ do?

And how does that relate to Taylor Swift?

LaborIQ is a compensation data platform that gives HR and business leaders real-time salary benchmarking for thousands of job titles across every U.S. market. Companies use that data to fill roles faster, reduce turnover, and get ahead of pay equity and transparency requirements.

To keep those benchmarks accurate, LaborIQ’s team of economists, research analysts, data scientists and data engineers adds new job titles to the platform every week. Deciding which titles make the cut – and which don’t – is a more rigorous process than it might look from the outside. One real example, involving a certain pop star, shows exactly how that process works.

Why adding a job title isn’t as simple as it sounds

Many companies use highly specific, sometimes one-off job titles. That specificity is great for a job posting, but it’s a problem for compensation data: the more niche a title, the harder it is to benchmark accurately against the market.

So before LaborIQ adds a title, the team has to answer a harder question: is this actually a distinct job, or is it a familiar role wearing a new name?

How LaborIQ researches a new job title

The process starts with a request and ends with a market-backed pay recommendation. Here’s what happens in between:

📧 A user submits a request. User requests we add a job, like Taylor Swift Reporter, along with their job description.

📊 The research team investigates. Our team conducts market research and data analysis to identify the core skills and responsibilities for the job. Is this a common job title? What are similar jobs in the market? Is this job already in our system?

💸 The data science models run. LaborIQ’s software recommends a current-market compensation figure based on those skills and responsibilities, using forecasting models built on labor market data.

Case study: the “Taylor Swift reporter” job title

In 2023, USA Today’s parent company posted about hiring a reporter to cover the Taylor Swift beat full time.

Would LaborIQ add “Taylor Swift reporter” as a distinct, benchmarkable job title? No – and the reasoning illustrates the three criteria every new title has to clear.

• Sample size. At the time, there appeared to be exactly one role like it in the U.S., and it hadn’t even been filled yet. A market compensation recommendation needs a real sample to validate against — you can’t benchmark a sample size of zero.
• Quantifiable skills. Knowing Taylor Swift’s discography might make you great at parties, but it isn’t a skill that shows up consistently across a broad set of jobs, which is what compensation models are built to measure.
• Job differentiation. The real test is whether this role requires meaningfully different skills and experience than an existing title. A “Taylor Swift reporter” and a general entertainment or business reporter likely draw from the same core skill set, and a company would probably fill the role by hiring a seasoned journalist, not necessarily a superfan. Without real differentiation, there’s no case for a new job title.

That same three-part test – sample size, quantifiable skills, and job differentiation – is what LaborIQ’s team applies every week to the hundreds of job title requests it evaluates, from the mundane to the unusual.

HR News You Can Use

Inflation, inflation, inflation

💸Prices for key goods and services rose 3.7% over the past year according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released on October 12, 2023.

↩️September’s inflation report does represent a bit of a step backwards in terms of efforts to control price growth. But it is worth noting that we have made good progress on inflation.

👍The good news is that for most workers, wage growth is now outpacing inflation, which puts less pressure on businesses to raise compensation outside of planned merit or annual increases.

🏠Rising rents accounted for more than half of the increase in inflation. Younger workers, who tend to rent and fall on the lower end of the salary spectrum, are likely hit hardest by increases in their housing costs.