How can you benchmark salaries in the UK?

Why is salary benchmarking important? 

Pay isn’t the be-all and end-all factor in your staff staying at your company, or new employees choosing to take a position with you, but it definitely has an impact. From a jobseeker’s perspective, the salary being offered on a job advert is one of the main things that could attract them to apply for a role. This means as an employer, you need to be offering a face-value salary that at the very least rivals that of your competitors.

In terms of existing staff members, they will perform better if they feel they are appreciated and valued, and one way you can show this is to offer competitive pay. Studies have shown that 45 per cent of UK employers admit that they pay new hires more than existing employees. There are a number of reasons behind this: long-standing employees may have been paid a competitive rate at the time of hire, but economic changes might mean that their original salary is now less than the average. Another reason is that there is a skills gap in the market which means employers are forced to negotiate hard to secure high performing candidates, meaning they have to pay more as a result.

The risk of paying existing employees too low is that they may go elsewhere, perhaps to one of your competitors, while the risk of paying new employees too little is that they may not be attracted to your company in the first instance, leaving you with a job gap.

Salary benchmarking can help you retain your longstanding, best employees and attract high performing new ones.

How to benchmark salaries in the UK

Oftentimes, companies will post an expected salary alongside a job advert, but this isn’t always accurate and isn’t always the case, either. You can sometimes find information on job advert websites, but these often do not factor in complete benefits packages and do not account for individual experience and qualifications.

For the most precise salary benchmarking service, our pay benchmarking consultancy is the ideal solution. We have refined the process we have used to benchmark salaries over more than 20 years so that accurate and timely data is collected.

This allows businesses within similar sectors to analyse what they currently offer their employees versus what their competitors do, and gives them the information they need to create tailored salary packages inclusive of additional benefits so that they can both retain existing staff and attract new candidates.