What should compensable factors be based on?

We are constantly improving our award-winning CompAnalyst platform with new functionalities that are designed to help you get the right price, for the right job, every time. In this new series, we’ll be highlighting some of our recent enhancements, and demonstrating how they can help your organization navigate today’s rapidly evolving talent market.

Earlier this summer, we released our compensable factors functionality, built to help our customers tailor benchmark jobs to more accurately reflect their internal job descriptions. This new functionality illustrates the impact that certain pricing factors, including skills, education, and years of experience, can have on a job’s market price. By using this new functionality, CompAnalyst clients can now more accurately assess the market value of the exact job they’re looking to price, instead of relying on “close enough” job matches in traditional salary surveys.

What Is a Compensable Factor?

Compensable factors include skills, licenses, certifications, years of experience, educational requirements, working conditions, reporting structures, managerial responsibilities, and other factors that can impact the price of a job in a given pay market. Our HR-reported data on the pricing impacts of compensable factors adjustments allows our clients to tailor their pricing for the more than 15,000 unique job titles in our CompAnalyst Market Data database.

How Do Compensable Factors Impact the Job Price?

As you add, edit, and adjust compensable factors, our platform will recalculate the benchmark job’s original price, determining whether premiums (increases to the original base salary) or discounts (decreases to the original base salary) should be applied to the adjusted job's price based on your changes. The new adjusted base salary is determined by the compensable factors’ current value in the market.

For example, your organization might require Software Engineer I positions to know the Ruby on Rails programming language. In addition, you also might require these positions to have at least four years of experience instead of zero to two years. While the base 50th salary for the benchmark Software Engineer I position is $68,337, when you add the new skill and the additional years of experience to the job description and then recalculate the price, the job’s base 50th salary increases to $70,423 because of the market demand for the Ruby on Rails skill and software engineers with increased experience.

What should compensable factors be based on?

Why Would You Use Compensable Factors?

Pricing hot jobs and skills is one of the biggest challenges facing compensation and HR professionals today, yet skill-based pay premiums remain difficult to benchmark. In addition, many organizations have highly customized job descriptions for their unique jobs, further complicating their pricing. Our compensable factors functionality allows you to accurately price these unique jobs, customizing the individual job factors to reflect your specific organizational needs. This enables you to assess the true value of each job’s required skills and experience, rather than relying simply on “close enough” matches within traditional data sets.


Want to learn more about how our compensable factors functionality works? Book a demo of CompAnalyst today to see this feature in action.

Compensable factors were identified for the evaluation and pay band classification of positions and weighted to reflect Marquette's mission and values:

  • Education: Minimum level of education or formal training required
  • Work Experience: Minimum level of related work experience
  • Job Complexity: evaluates the complexity of duties and the extent to which the duties are standardized vs. non-standardized
  • Decision Making: evaluates the frequency and authority of decision making
  • Impact of Decisions: evaluates the impact of a job's decisions and probable consequences of errors
  • Contacts: evaluates the type, variety and purpose of work contacts
  • Technological proficiency: evaluates the degree of technical skill necessary to successfully and competently perform the job
  • Supervision exercised: evaluates the extent to which the job incumbent is required to explain, direct, prioritize, monitor, guide or perform traditional supervisory duties for others
  • Confidential information: evaluates the degree to which a job is required to handle confidential information
  • Working conditions: evaluates the frequency/exposure type to which a job involves exposure to conditions that tend to be hazardous/undesirable

These compensable factors help identify whether a position is exempt or non-exempt.

How do you determine compensable factors?

Compensable Factors.
Work Experience: Minimum level of related work experience..
Job Complexity: evaluates the complexity of duties and the extent to which the duties are standardized vs. ... .
Decision Making: evaluates the frequency and authority of decision making..

What are the 4 compensable factors?

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 has defined 4 most basic compensable factors: effort, skill, responsibility and working conditions. There are usually 5 to 12 compensable factors in any evaluation procedure. The compensable factors are different for different evaluations.

What are compensable factors What will you use as a manager?

What Are Compensable Factors? Compensable factors help employers decide how much a job is worth by identifying the most valuable elements of each position in your workforce: the factors on which you base compensation. Examples include skills, experience, and education.

How many compensable factors usually can be used to determine the relative value of a job?

There are four broad compensable factors, as defined within the United States Equal Pay Act of 1963, under which most compensable factors fall. These four are: Skills, which encompass factors such as years of experience, level of education, and overall ability.