Market Perspectives

Historically, a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy has obscured pay gaps and hindered the transparency of workplace wages. In today’s tight labor market, workers have choices in where they work, and are demanding equal pay for equal work. The goal of pay equity is to create workplaces that inspire loyalty, enthusiasm and trust by establishing an environment of transparency and equitable opportunity, ensuring fairness. The challenge for organizations is determining how to properly conduct bias-free pay equity analysis, including finding the right technology and identifying someone in HR to oversee pay equity on an ongoing basis.

Organizations benefit by getting ahead of the curve to get pay right, improving competitiveness to attract and retain top talent. The good news is that compensation technology companies have come a long way and are now providing platforms that track and manage pay through analytics, market intelligence, expert-level insights and custom reporting. Payscale, established in 2002, is a compensation software and data business that helps organizations manage pay, and helps individuals find out what they can make in a role.

Payscale provides HR the power to price jobs and adjust compensation to reflect real-time shifts in the market resulting from continuous changes to pay in every organization and industry. Organizations that utilize Payscale stay on top of compensation trends, promoting transparency as well as more effectively retaining top talent. For example, the gender pay gap could increase due to the influx of women returning to the workforce following the pandemic; it will be of utmost importance to get women reestablished in the workforce without having to sacrifice pay. Having the tools and technology to help manage and oversee this process will prove to be paramount in aligning compensation in the right amount to the right audiences.

Pressure is mounting for organizations to address pay equity, yet many are struggling with how best to tackle pay gaps and disparities. Most leaders do not realize their largest gap is the lack of ability to continuously manage pay equity from a process and technology perspective, ensuring that proper data and analytics are used. Leaders must be completely committed to a culture of transparency and understand the impact of pay equity to the employee experience and social governance. Payscale helps leaders — and the overall HR team — go beyond manual tasks and operate more efficiently. With options to contrast, manage and analyze data, Payscale delivers a crowdsourced database of more than 65 million salary profiles. This insight is invaluable for HR leaders looking to rigorously manage pay equity.

In late 2021, Payscale acquired CURO, a pay equity and compensation management technology provider. This addition expanded Payscale’s product portfolio with new features and capabilities, including self-service pay equity analysis, red flag alerts for leadership’s attention and fair-pay analysis and remediation in real time for new hires and promotion candidates. Payscale provides CURO’s pay equity and merit cycle management modules for market insights to benchmarked salaries.

And nearly one year after its merger with Payfactors, Payscale launched its new Payfactors platform. This updated software allows customers to access three unique data sets – such as employee-reported salary profiles – and provides tools to better understand how location, skills or other compensable factors impact pay. It provides a near real-time view of the labor market.

Software that examines skills – not just current and previous jobs – assists organizations in effectively initiating staff redeployments, which further alleviates turnover concerns. This allows organizations to not only address pay equity concerns, but also objectively make skills and competencies the foundation of workforce redeployments and other assignments. Ventana Research has asserted that by 2025, compensation market pricing processes deployed in three-quarters of organizations will include benchmarking of skills, not just jobs.

Historically, organizations have not had pay data readily accessible to support the management of pay equity. Or, if they did, they were not always consistent in implementing changes needed to close the gap. Payscale offers technology to assist organizations with mandating appropriate compensation, including pay equity. Payscale has been advancing its integration with other human capital management providers, but the platform also supports the needs of finance organizations. Given today’s efforts to recruit and retain talent, organizations can get ahead of the curve by having pay that is not only competitive but also compliant from a regulatory standpoint and perceived as fair across the organization. Compensation and HR leaders should assess Payscale’s offering and determine relative fit with related business priorities, adjacent systems and supporting data and processes.