Benchmarking helps you to set salaries and test employee benefit levels, taking account of the market for your organisation's size, operating sector and location.

The savings made by not paying the going rate for a role can be outweighed by the recruitment and training costs of replacing a valued employee who has been tempted away.

Regular benchmarking can help organisations explain how pay decisions have been informed and provide reassurance that external market evidence is being considered.

Advertised salaries can provide useful current evidence, but job titles, role scope and published pay ranges need careful interpretation. We use advertised pay information to provide context to established survey data and other relevant market sources rather than relying on it in isolation.

We start by understanding your organisation, the roles in scope and the purpose of the benchmarking work.

We then review relevant role information to assess the nature, size and level of each role. This helps us identify appropriate market comparisons and avoid relying on misleading or superficial job title matches.

Our benchmarking approach considers:

• the organisation’s sector, size and location

• the role’s responsibilities, complexity and seniority

• relevant comparator markets

• available survey and market data

• internal role relationships and pay positioning

• recruitment, retention and affordability considerations

• any specific context affecting the roles in scope

We use market evidence carefully, recognising that external data is rarely perfect. The value of benchmarking lies in interpreting the evidence and explaining what it means for the organisation.

We will then combine all of the data to provide you with a detailed report. This explains our methodology and background research, so you have the evidence that supports our findings.

We use a range of data sources to build a rounded view of the market.

These may include established salary survey databases, sector-specific sources, advertised salary evidence and EBRS’s own market information. We select sources based on the roles in scope, the organisation’s sector and the quality of available comparator data.

Where a role is specialist, hybrid or difficult to match, we explain the evidence used and the judgement applied, so that clients can understand the basis for our advice.

Your employee benefits offering can say a lot about your organisation's culture and values.

It can help to increase employee engagement with the business and increase the perceived value of your reward package.

We can benchmark pension contributions, annual leave, sick pay, allowances, flexible working and other core benefits.

Employee benefits can also be used to embed cultural change and to improve recruitment and retention.

Pay benchmarking is only useful if the role match is credible and the evidence is interpreted properly.

Job titles can be misleading. Roles with the same title can vary significantly in scope, seniority and organisational impact. Advertised salaries can also be incomplete or inconsistent, and survey data may need careful adjustment for organisation size, location or sector.

EBRS brings together market data and role analysis to provide a more reliable view of pay position.

We undertook role-by-role market analysis and salary-range advice to support leadership and employee discussions.

Here’s what the client told us:

‘We found your benchmarking support incredibly valuable… the research was extensive and it gave us the armour we needed to have an informed discussion with our employees.'