Compensation.BLR.com’s online Salary Finder provides you with the resources to search and access more than 2,400 jobs at the national, state, and local level, as well as for hundreds of different industries. The Salary Finder helps you create demographic profiles specific to your organization and then benchmark salaries against market data that are updated twice a year.

• Alternate Job Titles
• Job Grades
• Exempt & Non-exempt Determination
• Hour/Annual Rate Calculator
• Company Size Categories
• Current Market Data

• New Job Titles
• National, State & Metro Data
• Sort Mean 10th, 25th, 75th & 90th Percentile
• Capability to Export to Excel®
• Ability to Customize & Save Jobs

Each job in the organization should be thoroughly analyzed and described. Your job description should state clearly and simply:

For the purposes of the Americans with Disabilities Act, it is appropriate and necessary to list the essential and nonessential functions of the job in case someone asks for a job accommodation for a covered disability.

Here are five job description summaries in the engineering series, for discussion purposes:

Employers should note that a job title alone is insufficient to establish the exempt status of an employee. Instead, the status of an employee must be determined on the basis of whether the employee’s salary and duties meet the requirements of the regulations. If your company has not updated its job descriptions in over a year, it is possible that the actual work performed by employees under your current job titles has changed. Therefore, you may want to confer with managers, supervisors, and the employees when updating job descriptions. Once you have job descriptions that you believe accurately reflect the jobs performed, have your legal advisor review them, and sign and date the review so that you can prove your job descriptions are up to date and determine when a new review is necessary.

Job evaluation determines what jobs are worth on an absolute basis and relative to other jobs in the organization. It can be done in a variety of ways, but usually involves assigning “points” based on complexity, impact, budget, supervisory duties, and so on, and attaching job ranks based on the total number of points. Jobs that are of greater value to the organization have a higher labor grade; jobs of lesser value fill the lower grades. The five engineering jobs might be evaluated as follows:

Job pricing involves establishing rate ranges; that is, minimum, midpoint, and maximum dollar values for each labor grade. By studying wage and salary surveys, employers can compare wages in the labor market to the jobs within their organization. The result is a scale of wages that allows the employer to compete in the labor market (external equity) while ensuring that jobs that are worth more to the organization are paid more than those of lesser worth (internal equity).
Here’s an illustration of a set of rate ranges

Compensation Report Center - The compensation report center provides dashboard reports that will help you manage your compensation program. Find out how your organization's employee pay compares against rate ranges, compa-ratios, external surveys, and many other data points. The data can be interactively filtered and sorted, printed, and exported to Excel. Color coding highlights such things as “flight risks” (high performing employees with low compa-ratios) and employees who should be “red circled” (above the rate range max).

Grade A Job - Can’t find survey data for a unique job? Use this tool to determine rate range pay scale for any job. Simply score the job on nine (1-9) standard factors to determine its pay grade. Then, apply your demographic selections to determine relevant and current ranges for that job.

Rate Ranges - Use rate ranges as a reference to develop your own rate ranges. By assigning a rate range for each salary grade, you create a compensation structure based on market data that has internal equity built into the process.

Merit Increases - Determine what other organizations are budgeting for merit increases. BLR conducts an annual survey of over 1,100 organizations to provide you with the information you need to develop your merit increase budget for the coming year.

My Custom Reports - Create and save benchmark salary data reports the way you want them. Reports can include data for multiple jobs, metros, states, and industries, all downloadable to Excel.

My Saved Jobs - Save salary data for specific jobs and demographic profiles generated using the Salary Finder. Keep a library of positions you evaluated using the Grade a Job tool you can retrieve and compare positions

My Demographic Profiles - Create and save multiple combinations of industry, company size and geographic selections relevant to your company. View, sort, and edit all your company’s saved demographic profiles.