(PRWEB) February 25, 2009—In this time of continued belt tightening, company hiring needs to be smarter, that's why organizations need market intelligence in order to hire the right talent at the right price. In order to stay competitive, employers need to know what other companies are paying in various labor markets. When it comes to setting pay scales for senior management roles, an overwhelming majority of organizations (82 percent) use national salary survey data. A new WorldatWork survey, "Job Evaluation and Market-Pricing Practices," shows that compensation managers rely on industry data for sales positions and local data for administrative or production jobs.

"The comparative salary data used depends on the labor markets from which employers draw talent," said Jason Kovac, compensation practice leader for WorldatWork, the global human resources association. "For senior management positions, for example, multinational organizations recruit not just nationally but globally. When setting pay for these positions, organizations benchmark against national, not local, markets. Industry factors into setting salaries as well."

Key Findings:

• Market pricing, the HR practice of analyzing the "going rate" for benchmark jobs in relevant labor markets to set pay, has become the primary job evaluation method in most organizations especially when pricing senior level jobs. A majority (95 percent) of survey respondents indicated that pricing senior level jobs against the market was somewhat to very effective for attracting and retaining top talent...

(Read the entire release.)