On the first day of PayScale’s Compference18, our product leaders announced some exciting updates about our products and revealed our vision for what’s to come in the world of compensation. Here are the enhancements and new features you can expect to see across our product portfolio — InsightLab, MarketPay and Team.
1. Introducing the PayScale Platform
What is a platform? A platform is a business that connects people through technology, making an ecosystem that allows value to be created and exchanged. What all platforms have in common is that they bring people and organizations together in one place where they can interact with one another. A platform focus enables network effects that benefit all platform users. A simple way to think about it is that you use products, but you participate in a platform.
What does it mean for PayScale? To serve organizations of all sizes, PayScale will continue to deliver differentiated sets of features and solutions to meet the diverse needs and use cases of our different types of customers. However, all of our products are now built on top of a common set of technologies. With the upcoming release of a platform-optimized Team, Team and Insight Lab will share a single data lake, meaning that data flows freely through both products. Additionally, we are now able to increase the speed of innovation, by building a new feature once and deploying it across multiple products.
As a PayScale customer, you can expect multiple benefits, including:
- Scalable Solution: PayScale will be able to grow with your business.
- Fresh data, enabled through automated data syncing between PayScale products (e.g. Insight Lab and Team). It is also our goal in 2019 to build connections with HRIS providers such as SAP SuccessFactors and ADP. We are currently beta testing an integration with BambooHR and will release this integration to all customers in Q4.
- Access to more robust, richer datasets. As a customer, you’ll be able to benefit from the expansive data and insights we’ve collected from all other customers on the PayScale platform. The quality of compensation data you’ll have access to will continue to improve as more customers participate in PayScale’s platform. In the future, we will be able to provide you with deeper insights about your workforce (e.g. how pay increase decisions affect employee turnover).
- Results that grows with usage. As our compensation algorithms get access to larger datasets and learn from customers’ job matching behavior and their product usage patterns, our machines will continue to learn and we will evolve our compensation models to deliver smart and automated job matching to our customers. Today, we are applying machine learning to deliver automated job matching including; PayScale Crowdsourced, PayScale Company Sourced and Mercer data.
2. PayScale Now Supports Job-Based Ranges
What is it:
At this point, we’ve added support for Job-Based Pay Ranges in MarketPay. This feature is currently in beta in Insight Lab, and will become broadly available in Q4 this year. This feature allows customers to create a pay structure that focuses on employees’ specific jobs and their range penetration within that role. This can be an easier way to communicate pay progression and steps to higher pay to an employee than in a grade-based structure. As a user, you can create job-based ranges for a subset of your position while using a grade-based pay structure for the rest of your positions.
Why we built this:
PayScale products have always allowed customers to build grade-based pay structures. Grade-based pay structures were fairly common for a long time. In the days when jobs were relatively standard and static and workers held the same position for years, a grade-based pay structure worked well.
Yet, if a job isn’t “standard” or if it’s evolving quickly, it can be hard to rationalize what grade to slot a job into. Additionally, if the market value of jobs are moving quickly, the grade-based structure may start to fail. Lastly, assigning a job to a grade is a fairly subjective exercise; this can create problems where employees disagree with the pay grade they’re placed in.
Over the last few years, we’ve heard from multiple, enterprise customers that they are shifting away from grade-based pay structures, because they need to incorporate more flexibility and precision into their compensation plans.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”jobs today are becoming more unique, and the skills required for the jobs are mattering more and more in determining one’s pay. Understanding the details of a job and the skills required to do the job is more important than ever before.” quote=”After all, jobs today are becoming more unique, and the skills required for the jobs are mattering more and more in determining one’s pay. Understanding the details of a job and the skills required to do the job is more important than ever before.”]
By using job-based ranges, an organization is able to understand the true, competitive nature of each position, and effectively explain how pay decisions are made with their employees. With PayScale technology, enterprise organizations can easily build job-based ranges for hundreds or even thousands of jobs.
3. PayScale Team Has Been Rebuilt on PayScale’s Platform
What is it:
PayScale Team is our unified solution for managing the pay increase cycle, giving comp professionals and HR teams the ability to empower and collaborate with managers to get pay right.
Today we are excited to announce that PayScale Team has been rebuilt on PayScale’s Platform using new technology. The key benefits here are a unified manager experience between PayScale Team and Job Collaboration. This unification provides one place for managers to collaborate with HR to provide input on jobs (Job Collab) and influence the increase cycle (Team).
Some additional benefits include an upgraded user experience and bi-directional sync of data from Insight Lab to Team. We’ve also added new functionality including Org charts for managers to see their employees, pay history for employees — so that managers have context for making sound pay decisions. Last but not least, the updated Team provides line managers the ability to allocate discretionary budget to reward their direct report.
Why we built it:
Team was born out of our belief that involving people managers in the pay increase cycle will lead to fairer pay decisions, better pay perceptions for employees and, ultimately, an improved ability for organizations to retain key talent. Research shows that the way an employee feels about their pay isn’t just based on how much they’re paid, it’s also influenced by how well they understand the pay process at their organization.
Explaining pay decisions is often a role that falls onto the laps of (untrained) managers. For managers to effectively communicate pay decisions to employees, they themselves must understand and buy into the organization’s compensation strategy. What better way to help build managers trust in the process than to give them power to influence pay for their direct reports?
4. More robust access to data for all customers and better insights
Data is at the core of what we do as a company. This is an area where we will continue to invest resources in.
PayScale Company Sourced Data is our newest data offering — available to both Insight Lab and MarketPay customers. Because PayScale is now a platform, we were able to create a new type of salary survey from the collective data of our customer base. Every PayScale customer can now join our exclusive data sharing community and on a quarterly basis, receive aggregated data that’s specific to your market (city, industry) and covers fast-moving jobs.
Unlike standard surveys, receiving this valuable data requires no work (participation) from your end. By tracking customers’ in-product behaviors, and using customers’ previously uploaded HRIS data, PayScale aggregates the info and automatically generates updated compensation benchmarks every quarter.
At this time, we have over 1,000 organizations who are participating in this data sharing network covering over 800 locations. Collectively, participating organizations have provided salary data on three thousand jobs. At this point, PayScale Company Sourced Data has more city and jobs combination benchmarks for hot jobs and fast-moving jobs than any other surveys on the market.
Crowdsourced data is PayScale’s modern, continually refreshing compensation data source with an unprecedented depth of richness and detail on employee skills and location. It is built using a four-layer validation process upon the world’s largest real-time salary survey.
While PayScale has always been the leader in Crowd-Sourced data, in the past, you had to “cook up your own jobs” with crowd-sourced data. Going forward, we’re delivering you this data in a much more usable way – as curated cuts of data.
5. Rules Based Pricing for MarketPay Customers
What is it:
The Rules Based Pricing feature allows MarketPay customers to create a set of rules that can be applied to a set of jobs in order to automatically price the selected jobs. By setting your desired “best case” match preferences, Rules Based Pricing sets you up for controlled and consistent job matching, reducing the amount of time you’d otherwise need to spend matching in the future.
Why we built it:
With Rules Based Pricing, MarketPay customers can save massive amounts of time with automated job matching, for this year and next.
6. Other new offerings
BambooHR API Integration: Now Available in Insight Lab
We’ve released an integration between PayScale and BambooHR, so that customers who are using BambooHR as their HRIS system will automatically have their HRIS data refreshed every 24 hours. If you’re using a different HRIS system, talk to your HRIS provider and ask them to connect with PayScale.
Sign Up for a Beta Program
Several new features are now available in beta, please contact your Customer Success Manager to sign up:
- Custom Pay Equity Reporting Service for MarketPay customers (now)
- Job Based Ranges for Insight Lab (now)
- Insight Lab – BambooHR API Integration (now)
- Team 2.0 (now)
- Automated Job Matching (2019)
- API integration with ADP and SAP SuccessFactors (2019)
Want more info on how PayScale can help you take your comp plan to the next level? Request a demo of our platform.
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