• Survey Approach vs. The People Ticker
• Banding / Experience Level Calibration
• Pay Rate vs. Bill Rate
• Understanding Markups
• Developing a Rate Card
• Negotiation Guide

Survey Approach vs. The People Ticker

Companies spend millions of dollars annually to gather salary and compensation data from firms that use the survey approach. These surveys allow companies to compare their salary and compensation plans to those of other companies that participate in the same surveys. The use of The People Ticker allows companies to compare their rates and salaries to the job/applicant marketplace that exists at any point in time.

Traditional compensation tools use the surveyed information and make it available in several reporting formats to subscribers. The survey approach allows subscribers to see annual compensation data for individuals and related skill sets that have already been hired at some historical point in time. On the other hand, The People Ticker is a non-survey based rates and salary tool that provides its users a GUI for on-demand searching to see hourly/annual salary data related to the next hire in today’s market. Since the administration of surveys is a time consuming process, their use has been almost exclusively directed toward salary and other compensation data for full time workers or employees. Since the contingent worker market tends to be more volatile, effective information relative to the rates for contingent workers was not available until nextSource developed The People Ticker.

However, it should be emphasized that The People Ticker focuses on both contingent and full time workers. Contingent or hourly data is tracked independently of full time or annual data for better accuracy. The hourly rate is not derived by simply dividing the full time salary by 2,000 hours or some other estimate of time worked. Through the technology of the Internet, there is an overwhelming amount of information and data available in the public domain regarding salaries, jobs, skill sets, etc. However, it is very time consuming for the normal user of contingent labor to begin to identify these sources of information and to review, properly classify and analyze the data. The technology of The People Ticker accomplishes all these tasks and brings user-friendly results directly to the user’s desktop.

The following table summarizes some of the difficulties associated with the gathering and comparing of salary and rate information for full time and contingent workers using existing survey approaches.

Every Company has its unique Job Titles

Survey based tools ask the user to make a selection from a pre-defined list of job titles to return data related to salaries. The participating companies must match their current employee population to the pre-defined list of job titles based on some pre-determined percentage match. This action requires a great deal of subjectivity.

Every Company has unique skill set definitions for titles

In order to obtain the highest percentage of matches, survey based tools create very general job descriptions to map to the pre-defined list of job titles. Participating companies make determinations of employee roles and functions to get a “best-fit” for the response. This illustrates that although the survey company may be working from a pre-defined list of titles and descriptions, subjectivity still remains in defining where each position is classified for survey purposes. A respondent may be left with making decisions such as:

• This skill set is a programmer that provides DBA functional support; which job title/description do I assign? Programmer or DBA?
• I have an Access DBA ($55k/yr) and an Oracle DBA ($80k/yr), both considered senior level, do I enter both salaries as Senior DBA?

Every Company has some level of internal banding for each skill set

There are several methods for companies to define internal banding. Some companies have 3 experience levels (jr, mid, sr), others have 4 (jr, mid, sr, expert/guru), and some as many as 5 (intern, jr, mid, sr, expert/guru).One company’s mid level may be another company’s senior level. Survey companies provide anywhere from 3-6 or more experience levels leaving respondents with the task of not only classifying based on title and skill set, but on experience level as well.

In summary, survey based compensation tools attempt to create universal job titles/descriptions that creates a “one size fits all” model for job titles, job descriptions, and experience levels. This allows them to maximize the number of data points for each job title. However, this leaves respondents and users looking at:

1. Results that are subjective, too general and may not address their specific skills
2. Results that apply to its existing employee base

As an alternative, The People Ticker is a non-survey based tool that does not attempt to create universal job titles/descriptions. Instead, The People Ticker:

1. Recognizes that effective rates and salary data cannot be based on standard job titles
2. Recognizes that rates and salary data vary based on specific skill sets
3. Focuses on the Job/Applicant Market rather than historical data related to an embedded base of employees
4. The Job/Applicant Market is relatively unstructured due to the varying jobs that companies are recruiting and the varying skill sets of the applicants.

The People Ticker’s methodology deals with the above factors in the following ways:

Recognizes that rates and salary data cannot be based on standard job titles

With The People Ticker, users apply their own internal job titles rather than a third party’s pre-defined job titles. The People Ticker uses the job title as simply a label for a specific skill set definition.

Recognizes that rates and salary data vary based on specific skill sets

The People Ticker allows the user to define exactly what skill sets they would like to price.

Focuses on the current Job/Applicant Market rather than on historical data

By tracking information of employment related web sites, our vendor management sites, resumè distribution tools etc, The People Ticker focuses on actual data being used to source/engage applicants in today’s market. This allows The People Ticker to respond to supply and demand fluctuations offering a current view of the Job/Applicant market.

The Job/Applicant Market is relatively unstructured

Users typically have internal experience banding defined which may not map directly to that used by survey companies. It is universally recognized that the Job/Applicant Market is relatively unstructured relative to experience banding. The People Ticker allows users to create structure within the unstructured market.