96 Survey participation season: What's new

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Comp and Coffee. I'm Ruth Thomas, Chief Evangelist here at Payscale and the current custodian of our podcast where we aim to bring you insightful discussions and expert insights to keep you informed and empowered in the ever evolving landscape of

[00:00:29] reward and compensation. So whether you're a seasoned compensation professional or new to the topic, our podcast is your go-to resource for staying ahead of the curve. So grab your favourite beverage, coffee or not, tune in and let's get started. So in today's episode

[00:00:46] we're going to focus on the topic of salary surveys or third party salary survey participation. So at Payscale we have our own proprietary data sources that you can use through our compensation management platforms, but we also allow you to combine multiple surveys

[00:01:03] including data from survey publishers and manage all of your surveys in one place. And we have teams here at Payscale who focus on supporting our customers through participation and survey results season. And I've asked some of them to join me here today so we can

[00:01:18] learn more about how we do this at Payscale and dig deeper into this topic. So today I'm joined by Gerard Smith, who is VP of data expansion, Amy Bredema, senior manager, site ops and support and Matt Chalek, senior data manager. Welcome to all three of you, all

[00:01:34] first timers on the podcast. Thanks, Ruth. So let me get you to introduce yourselves to the audience first and maybe just tell us who you are and explain your role here at Payscale. Gerard, do you want to start us off?

[00:01:49] Sure. Well, I'm Gerard Smith and I lead the data expansion teams here at Payscale. And one of the primary areas of focus is we manage third party survey data that we receive from our customer. Our data teams are focused on quickly transforming and accurately putting

[00:02:09] customers' data onto our platforms so as to be able to effectively use the data as quickly as possible. I've been with Payscale for over 12 years, working consistently to deliver value to our customers and continually improving our operations and customer experience.

[00:02:27] Before joining Payscale, I was a human resources and payroll implementation consultant across various industries like retail, media, banking, manufacturing, airlines and software. Following my foray into consulting, I went into a corporate job managing HR systems, benefits administration and competition functions for Fortune 500 companies, particularly in telecom and building

[00:02:57] and construction. Great. Thank you, Gerard. Amy, do you want to introduce yourself? I'm Amy Bredemann. I currently manage the Payscale site operations team for the market pay product client. My team refreshes our client's survey data, matches annually and

[00:03:15] helps to get their market pay site ready for survey participation. I've been fortunate to support the market pay clients for over 11 years here at Payscale. Prior to my 25 years in compensation, I was an HR generalist and I worked in the financial services, medical

[00:03:32] device, public utilities and real estate before joining Comp Technology. Great. Thank you, Amy. And Matt, over to you. Hello, I'm Matthew Chalik. I'm a senior data manager who supports third party compensation data. My team receives and processes the actual published survey results for use in the Payscale

[00:03:51] products. I have almost 10 years personally in my role at Payscale on a team with an average tenure of over five years of experience doing this work. Great. Well, as first time is on the podcast, I do need to ask, are you a coffee drinker

[00:04:06] or are you a tea drinker? And who wants to offer first? Coffee, all the way. Definitely coffee for me. Quad shot Americano, my go-to. And Matt? Coffee black every morning. Great. So you are allowed officially on the Coffee and Comp, or Comp and Coffee podcast.

[00:04:29] So Gerard, do you want to start us off and tell us how do we work with the survey providers here at Payscale? How does that relationship work? Sure. Sure. I think, you know, we partner with as many third party survey providers

[00:04:43] as we possibly can. Recognizing that like we closely work with the biggest major publishers, like Mercer, Aon, Willis-Tars, Watson, Corn Ferry, Culpepper, M-site. You know, this is central to our business and the data that they're putting out is central to our customers' businesses and needs from our platform.

[00:05:14] And this has really been a journey for us where eight, nine years ago, we made a decision to partner with the major publisher primarily to reduce the administrative burden on our mutual customers. You can think of things like NDAs that are required when

[00:05:34] our customers are purchasing data from a third party. They're receiving that data from a third party and then putting it onto another company's platform. It's a lot of, you know, legal things that we needed to get through. And our intent was to make things much easier for

[00:05:55] our customers. And, you know, we have close to 15 of these like significant relationships with major publishers where they've even blossomed into things like reselling survey publisher data. Or in other cases, we have survey publishers that are sending data directly to us,

[00:06:18] in some cases before their customers are actually receiving the data from them. This gives us a way to receive the data, get the data onboarded onto our product and allows our customers to see the data before they even have to go out and pull anything special or interact

[00:06:38] with the survey publisher to track down where the survey report is. We've already received it and gotten it onto our platform for data use. Thank you. So we aim to make it easy for them to get the

[00:06:49] access to salary survey data. What features do we have in our products to help them curate and use that salary data? Our compensation management products provide features to assist the client in their compensation cycle. So from survey participation, survey results library,

[00:07:06] year-over-year survey data refresh of their market pricing, and a robust report library for the client to conduct their year-end market analysis. We also provide a client portal. Our PaidScale Connect houses knowledge articles related to compensation practices, our product features and usage,

[00:07:28] and through our Academy program, a client can participate in self-guided learning paths of our product features. We also with AI offer market pain matches or a job match recommender to assist in getting their jobs matched in the third-party data from their specific library.

[00:07:48] At PaidScale, we've been leading the way in processing publisher survey data for more than a decade now. The tools we've developed and continue to constantly refine have removed any possibility of error and made the process faster and simpler than it has ever been. Oftentimes

[00:08:03] we're able to activate that data with very minimal and sometimes no involvement from the client whatsoever. We're also able these days to instantly capture standard reports, create custom reports, allow customizable reporting, aging of data, and currency conversion of the data in a very simple

[00:08:25] and refined process. And Ruth, you know to add on, I think in a recent comp and coffee session that you spoke with James Atkinson about, he talked about our new AI capabilities related to

[00:08:41] peer matching and making it easier for customers to match to PaidScale data product. But you know, I'm here to tell you today as it relates to third-party data product, you know our discussions around AI have not stopped with just PaidScale peer data.

[00:09:01] Our product and engineering teams are focused on leveraging AI to assist customers in matching and making match recommendation to all data sources within our product, especially publisher survey data. As a technology company, we're managing large amounts of data for our customers

[00:09:22] and they're leveraging a multitude of third-party survey data. PaidScale is committed to enhancing our customers' experience through the use of AI in matching and match recommendation to all data sources and all customers utilizing our products. Ultimately,

[00:09:45] this translates to more and more data, this use of AI. Customers can make more matches, they can send more data to survey publishers who then can turn around and release survey report that are more robust because of the increase in data that's being sent. So all in all,

[00:10:07] really like a win-win across the board as we're focusing on this where customers are winning by making it easier to make match it, publishers are winning in terms of getting more data from PaidScale customers based off of the matching that we're making and PaidScale is benefiting

[00:10:26] because we're the enabler in that process. So I'm super excited about it, I'm super excited about work that our product team is putting, product and engineering team is putting into it. Great, yeah, it's good to hear all that developments around AI there. Now we have

[00:10:45] customers of all different sizes here at PaidScale from kind of like one-person companies up to 100,000-person companies. Do you have to be a certain size of organization to get value out of a survey publisher's data? Yeah, that's a great question. You know,

[00:11:03] when we look at it, we look at it in terms of like the breadth of the data that we're seeing on a year-in and year-out basis. We see survey data from over 300 different survey publishers and those data sets, those survey report can vary from general industry survey

[00:11:19] where all companies are incorporated into one data set. But there are also many specialty surveys that we see and you know, you would think like the typical industries that we would see salary surveys are like general industry, banking and finance,

[00:11:41] technology, healthcare, education, manufacturing, retail, like all very predictable, right? But there are very much specialty surveys for like art, entertainment and recreation, law firm specifically, travel and tourism, aviation surveys, even credit unions and not-for-profit.

[00:12:05] So, like from a size of company and breadth of data, I guess I'm saying there's pretty much a survey out there for any company in any industry if they're looking for and needing access to

[00:12:20] relevant compensation data. As far as does a company need to be a certain size, get value out of survey publisher data? I'd say if companies are thinking about the rate of inflation or lower unemployment rate in terms of attracting and retaining employees, so the cost of living for

[00:12:44] their employees while all working to meet their business goals year-in and year-out, yes, I would say getting access to more and more data including third-party survey data is the way to go to help ensure companies that they're staying competitive in the labor market

[00:13:01] and striving to meet their business goal. We do find, you know, generally speaking that smaller organizations that are using third-party survey data tend to be more on the proactive side when it comes to managing their workforce and overall health of their business.

[00:13:19] Great, that's really interesting. And we've just released yesterday a new report here from PayScale called our Top Performers Report. And in that, we're looking at organizations that exceeded their revenue goals in 2023 according to our compensation best practice report.

[00:13:37] And we're trying to see what are the behaviors of these successful organizations and one of them is using multiple data sources and that they're more likely to use more data sources. And that

[00:13:48] is kind of a link between that and driving revenue outcomes. So, all this is really important. So, let's talk some numbers here. How many surveys? How many customers? Like, how busy are you three on a daily basis? We're busy. We're definitely busy. So,

[00:14:07] right now, PayScale has over 3,000 customers that are using and consuming third-party survey data. We're the industry leader for sure. And we're managing over 30, or sorry, 40,000 surveys annually on behalf of our customers, receiving data, getting it on our platforms, getting it described

[00:14:27] to each of our customers' library. That's an average of about 12 to 13 surveys per customer. But those libraries and customer-by-customer basis can range from one to two, 13 to 20, 30 to 40,000 surveys per customer. And then we have a wide breadth of customers and data use on

[00:15:02] a customer-by-customer and industry-by-industry basis. One thing to note, and I think it's really an important data point, we house over 30 million employee records within our compensation products. And ultimately, that translates to 30 million customers benefiting from their company's use

[00:15:26] of third-party survey data and their compensation organization focused on getting pay right for their customers. Great, thank you, Gerard. So we know managing compensation is very cyclical. We've all worked in compensation for quite some time. So that annual cycle is quite repetitive.

[00:15:47] Survey participation obviously has its own annual cycle and its own timeline. Amy, I think, can you tell me where we are in the survey participation calendar now? And what should anybody listening

[00:15:58] to this call be thinking about right now? What should they be doing now? What's coming up next for them? Sure. So for right now, we're seeing that most of our U.S. survey

[00:16:10] submissions have been due and we're really on the tail end of survey participation for our U.S. surveys. For international surveys, we're really still in the thick of it. And we expect to see

[00:16:22] that usually fall off the end of July, beginning of August, depending on the publisher. But there are industries that collect data at different points throughout the year. A lot of our education and health care receives their submissions early in the year, end of the fourth quarter of the

[00:16:43] prior year, because those survey results are released at the beginning of Q1. And are there any participation, any other participation cycles or trends that we're seeing this year? Well, there are. It's not this year. We've been seeing a growing number of publishers

[00:17:02] accept participation data throughout the calendar year, generally on a quarter by quarter basis. We call this the evergreen participation and we're seeing this trend is really accelerating based on a customer's demands for more and more real-time data.

[00:17:17] Yeah, that's interesting because we are seeing that growing demand, particularly as we've seen acceleration of wage growth and dips in activity in the labour markets. So obviously survey providers, we're dealing with loads of different survey providers.

[00:17:33] Any key trends, any tips on what's new this season? Any big changes happening at the providers, Matt? We historically see the major publishers make big changes every three to four years to keep in line with trends in the market economy. The biggest change we're seeing this

[00:17:51] year is the consolidation of the Aon, Radford and McLoggin databases. This is a large change we've been able to overcome for our clients. Users of the historic Radford database won't see as many changes. They'll just see a large expansion of the jobs available and the cuts

[00:18:07] available to concisely place their compensation matches. The McLoggin users are seeing a large change with a large number of historic McLoggin reports now being moved over into the Aon, Radford database. This means the job codes, the job titles, the data cuts they're historically used to seeing

[00:18:26] are transformed into this new database. We put in place the tools and information to make this transition seamless for many clients and as easy as possible for clients who are going to experience additional challenges because of this change. We're also seeing some changes in smaller or

[00:18:43] less impactful changes among publishers. Some are very small. We're seeing some larger changes at Colette and Schaefer where they're changing their job code format and the Culpeper reports which are changing their job leveling. Even at Mercer, which is one of our largest providers,

[00:19:04] we're seeing that they've changed their executive leveling tiers this year, which is something we've been able to again seamlessly put in place for our clients so that their historic matches automatically translate over to the new leveling matrix. And how do we make that easy for our

[00:19:24] customers to navigate through that? Can one of you sort of enlighten me there? Yeah, sure. I mean this touches on our relationship with publishers at its core. As I mentioned earlier, our relationship with third-party providers makes a big difference in our customers' experience with PayScale.

[00:19:44] And over the last four to five years, PayScale has partnered with the leading compensation providers to host a series of joint participation webinars, ultimately to get the most up-to-date information on all the changes that the publishers are introducing in the coming year.

[00:20:05] These webinars give our customers a greater level of insight into the annual changes that are occurring at the most widely used survey publishers and ultimately surveys being consumed by our customers. These webinars are some of the most frequently attended events that we host generally in the

[00:20:26] springtime from March to mid-April, and we make those recordings available throughout the calendar year and are frequently accessed through the course of the year. So if we've got PayScale customers listening, where can they access that? Is that through the PayScale Connect platform? That's right.

[00:20:47] The recordings would be through PayScale Connect. Great, okay. So one thing I'm observing, and we've been talking about it in some of the thought leadership webinars we've been doing on data, is we're seeing an increase in newer data sources coming to the market. For example, job postings data,

[00:21:06] clearly kind of an impact of the pay transparency legislation that we're seeing developing. How do you see, Gerard, the data market evolving here? Yeah, I mean, I think Matt and Amy kind of

[00:21:18] touched on it as it relates to some of the changes that they're seeing, particularly this year. Matt mentioned the Aon Radford-McGloggin change. Amy talked a little bit about publishers moving to more evergreen participation cycles so as to release

[00:21:40] data more frequently through the course of the year. In terms of newer data product, we really haven't seen anything quite yet. While there's a lot of discussion around the use of job posting data by way of legislation that's been put in place over

[00:22:01] the last three to four years, we haven't seen that translate to poor compensation data products that are out in the marketplace yet. Now, that's not to say things aren't coming along, but we'll have a pretty good indicator as to what kind of

[00:22:23] traction those data products get based off of our 3,000 customers. But I personally think it's going to take some time to see significant momentum as it relates to the job posting data influencing the competition world. Go ahead, Ruth. Yeah, I kind of agree with you there. I mean,

[00:22:45] it's obviously an emerging trend. I think when we've talked about this before on webinars, we've said it's really important just to understand your data source to make sure that you're using it for the right thing. For example, job posting data might be something you use on an

[00:23:05] ad hoc basis if you are pricing a particular job in a geo or a difficult job, but it's not something you're going to be using to update your annual structures or something like that. So I think getting more familiar with your data sources is really important.

[00:23:20] Completely agree. I mean, it may be a great data source to fill some gap. I learned years ago when I started with MarketPay, the owner at the time would say any data is better than no data. Absolutely.

[00:23:43] No, you're fine. I guess what I want to say is when I am speaking to customers and colleagues, folks that I've known for 25 years in the com profession, we talk about the core pay elements

[00:23:56] of compensation. Everything that we were taught by World at Work, base pay, STI, LPI, total cash, total direct. I really just have difficulty seeing job posting data being able to provide anything more than competitive base pay at this point. Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting

[00:24:19] to watch this space. You mentioned earlier just what impact AI is going to have across all of this. I think it's going to be transformational at some stage. So thank you, all three of you,

[00:24:31] for coming along today. You've obviously all got an amazing amount of experience in this field. Any final thoughts for our listeners today? I guess I would say in the last few years, the compensation landscape has changed dramatically. Labor markets are extremely

[00:24:49] tight and for a long time. Consumer price index and inflation are dinner table conversations. Pay transparency and pay equity legislation has become extremely active. And more and more HCM technology providers are employing the use of AI to enhance productivity gain.

[00:25:10] There is a lot circling in the compensation world. And PayScale is here to assist every step of the way by giving customers and employees confidence to know the what and why behind pay. With our leading data technology experience, we make it easier to get your compensation to gold.

[00:25:31] And if our listeners want to find out more about salary surveys, they find that on our website? Oh yeah, that's a good question. They can reach out to me directly if they're a customer or not. Maybe via LinkedIn. We're always happy to share information around where our customers

[00:25:54] or prospects can find the best data for their particular situation, industry or specialty job that they're looking for. Great, thank you. Well, Amy, Matt and Gerard, thank you very much for joining me today. If you've got any thoughts about what we've discussed today

[00:26:14] or any suggestions for future topics for comp and coffee, you can email us at coffee at payscale.com. And just a final thank you all for listening in today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ruth. Thanks, Amy and Matt for joining us too. Super appreciated. Thank you all.

[00:26:34] Thank you for listening to our comp and coffee podcast. For more on our survey data, go to payscale.com slash products slash data.