What are benchmark jobs used for?

A benchmark job enables the accumulation and analysis of the labor market within a company, industry, or regional area. Doing so enables employers, researchers, government agencies, and other entities to make various types of determinations, from hiring to promotions to training.

Índice Show

How Organizations Benchmark Roles
After Data Collection
Hiring and Promotions
Continued Development
What Surveys Have Salary Benchmark Jobs?
Why Benchmark Jobs Don’t Mesh with Self-Reported Surveys

How Organizations Benchmark Roles

Human resources professionals will typically handle the investigation and administration of the bench-marking. The first step in determining which jobs will be bench-marked and what salaries, requirements, and responsibilities will be included in a role within an organization is to research.

To complete the data collection, a survey of salaries of similar positions is conducted, including those within a geographic area and across an industry as a whole. Surveys can be completed several different ways. Some organizations have managers and other employees complete worksheets to determine the work traits and aptitudes that are most essential to perform specific job functions. In addition to surveys, research is conducted to identify labor trends and statistics related to a specific position.

After Data Collection

Analyzing the worksheets, survey responses, and research of a benchmarked position enables organizations to outline all aspects of a position. In some cases, salary ranges are compared within the organization as well. From that data, organizations are able to set the standard pay rates per position, along with establishing pay raise increases and increments.

Benchmarking also includes scaling the positions in order to adjust pay rates by entry level, lower management, middle management, and so on. This includes outlining the skills that a position will require an employee to have, education and additional training that are required, and the tasks that employees will have to complete in a given role. These factors drive the administration of several other human resources-related functions of an organization.

Hiring and Promotions

One specific way that benchmarking positions can be helpful for organizations is in the hiring process. Benchmarks enable hiring managers or human resource specialists to develop interview questions and application assessments that pinpoint the ideal candidates for employment.

Related resource: Top 25 Best Affordable Bachelor’s in Human Resources Degree Programs 2014

Another benefit is in terms of assessment of employee performance. A benchmark job not only determines the types of skills an employee must have, but it also sets up the goals and accountabilities that are integral to a position. During employee reviews, managers and human resources specialists can evaluate performance based on those goals.

Continued Development

Once a job is bench-marked with salary, skills, and other requirements, the addition of intrinsic traits that a candidate will need to best fit the position can also be added. Examples include work ethic, attitude, dedication and loyalty to a company, empathy in interpersonal communication, emotional stability, and willingness to accept coaching and ongoing training.

Organizations such as the Society for Human Resource Management offer examples of benchmarking reports and additional information on incorporating those reports into human resources functions.

The identification of a standard for an employee to meet in order to be hired for a position and be promoted or receive raises and additional benefits is often best established through the process of benchmarking. A benchmark job offers an objective evaluation tool and creates transparency and equality throughout an organization.

Benchmark jobs were used in collecting salary market data for building the university compensation plan. By definition, benchmark jobs are those with a clear and consistent definition in the relevant labor market, for which reliable market data could be collected. University job classifications were identified as benchmark jobs to represent each of the job functions and pay levels. Following is a listing of benchmark jobs by pay level and job function within each pay level.

Level 2
Level 3
Level 4
Level 5
Level 6
Level 7
Level 8

A benchmark job may be defined as a job that can be used to anchor the employee’s pay scale and around which other jobs are arrange in the order of their relative worth. Job evaluation can be used to find out the relative worth of each job. These are mostly the common and defined jobs for which all data related to pay-scales and other specifications are mentioned and readily available.

These jobs also remain consistent across different organizations. They normally have the same set of responsibilities from one organization to other. Data about these jobs are readily available as many people work in these jobs across different organizations. Data about these benchmark jobs are extremely important for conducting the salary surveys. These data can be used by organizations to compare the wages that this organization is offering to its employees and whether they are fair in their wages. These data can also be used for job analysis purpose so that workplaces may be reorganized to increase productivity and efficiency of the organization. Data about benchmark jobs can also be found from public surveys.

Some of the examples of benchmark jobs include security, secretarial, accounting that may be easily found and data are readily available. Non-benchmark jobs are on the other hand those jobs that are unique to an organization and the salary grades for these jobs are decided by comparing them with the related benchmark jobs.

Hence, this concludes the definition of Benchmark Job along with its overview.

This article has been researched & authored by the Business Concepts Team. It has been reviewed & published by the MBA Skool Team. The content on MBA Skool has been created for educational & academic purpose only.

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A salary benchmark job is defined as a job that is widespread across many industries. For example, Accountant is a benchmark job. Some companies may title the job Bookkeeper or Financial Planner. But if the job descriptions for these roles are the same, they would each fall within the benchmarked job of Accountant.

Compensation surveys use benchmark jobs so that participating organizations can be consistent in reporting compensation data for their employees. They also assure workers doing the same job are paid comparatively to other workers, even if they have different job titles, and even if they are at different companies.

Compensation surveys are invaluable for establishing accurate and effective hiring processes. However, compensation surveys cannot tell you exactly how much you should pay your employees.

Salary benchmark jobs will give you an idea of what similar companies pay their employees in similar positions to your unique roles. To find the right job match, we recommend your organization look for benchmark jobs whose content matches 80% or more of the content of your internal job description.

For instance, Business Development Representative and Sales Representative may seem similar based on job title alone, but a comparison of the job descriptions might reveal one job or the other is a better match for your internal position.

Salary benchmark jobs are usually defined in terms of employee category (e.g., management, individual contributor), department (e.g., sales, marketing), and level (e.g., entry, intermediate). Each of these buckets reflect a common organizational structure so survey participants can more easily match jobs.

What Surveys Have Salary Benchmark Jobs?

Salary benchmark jobs are used in a variety of employer-reported surveys. Among a few of the most common are:

Government surveys – The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes data for certain jobs and geographic areas, but this usually appears as raw, uncut data. Organizations will often use subscription and custom surveys to meet more specific salary benchmark job data needs.
Subscription surveys – These are typically published by a third-party survey publisher who collects, analyzes, summarizes, and reports the results on an annual basis. Participating organizations will usually pay a fee to have full access to the report, but can also request specific cuts of benchmark job data (such as based on location, industry, or company size).
Custom surveys – These are similar to subscription surveys, but are conducted less frequently and tend to be limited to a niche group of participants (such as in a specific industry, e.g., healthcare). Salary.com has its own set of custom surveys which deliver a tailored look into data for specific jobs in local markets or specific peer groups.

Why Benchmark Jobs Don’t Mesh with Self-Reported Surveys

In subscription or custom surveys, employers or HR professionals are reporting data for all employees in specific jobs. But in self-reported surveys, employees report their own compensation data – usually online.

Self-reported data is typically considered less reliable than employer-reported data since:

Employees are not as skilled at assessing their own job levels and matching them to that survey’s specific scopes.
Data cannot be easily verified by the vendor.
Data of this type is often rounded.
Entrants occasionally enter bogus data while filling out a form to receive free content as a reward, such as a white paper, webinar access, or online article access.

Ultimately, it is very difficult to know if self-reported data represents the market overall. As a result, specific salary benchmark job data in self-reported salary surveys is not as reliable for compensation management.

Salary benchmark jobs are the compass by which companies can understand a survey and begin the job benchmarking process. Both the Salary.com consumer wizard and CompAnalyst platform for small businesses and enterprises utilize curated, HR-reported data from surveys to generate the most accurate price points available.