To compete for talent, organizations use benchmarking, a procedure in which an organization compares its own practices against those of successful competitors. Benchmarking involves the use of pay surveys. These provide information about the going rates of pay at competitors in the organization’s product and labour markets. An organization can conduct its own surveys, but the federal government and other organizations make a great deal of data available already.
Human resource professional need to determine whether to gather data focussing on particular industries or on job categories. Industry specific data is especially relevant for jobs with skills that are specific to the type of product. For jobs with skills that can be transferred to companies in other industries, surveys of job classifications will be more relevant.