TalentTech News

How to Calculate a Market-Based Salary to Attract Top Talent

Written by Rosie Greaves, LaborIQ Staff Writer | Jun 20, 2023 7:37:00 PM

If you are a hiring manager searching for employees, you’re already aware of the challenges to secure top talent. It’s a candidate's market in many ways, especially for those occupations with already-low unemployment.

It can be frustrating to invest time and effort to source and interview an excellent job candidate, only to have the candidate accept another company’s offer or even a counteroffer from their current employer. Good labor market intelligence to stay on top of talent supply, hot hiring markets and diversity can provide you with a strategic advantage.

You could look to a free job board for crowd-sourced answers, but these are only as accurate and current as the data those participating job hunters are willing to share. You could turn to median salary data, which may be accurate but only shows the middle rate for a given job - half of the salaries are higher and half are lower.

To get it right, you'll need current, market-based salary data that takes into account all factors and indicators when calculating competitive compensation for a job offer.

What Factors Impact Market-Rate Salaries?

All jobs should be customized for your unique role requirements. These, and other factors, impact the market-driven comp for each job, including:

  1. Job location
  2. Required experience
  3. Required education
  4. Industry
  5. Company size and revenue

Competitive, market-driven compensation or what the market (maybe your competitors) are willing to pay for a candidate is not determined just by your company's factors above, but also by the local economic conditions, job growth for the occupation, and local talent supply. Understanding all of the variables, including salary and supply forecast, enables you to be at the forefront as a top-paying employer - that's what will attract the right talent to your brand.

Accuracy Matters

Keeping up with compensation demands in today's competitive job market can be challenging.

Without current, validated compensation data, you risk losing top candidates, or worse, employee turnover.

LaborIQ® eliminates the inaccuracies that come with crowd-sourced salary data so you get compensation right for every job. Every time.

Get a custom compensation report for your unique job. Request a report