Participating in a CELRE salary survey

Organisations which participate in CELRE salary surveys get far more out of the findings than those which simply buy the end report.

Having gone through the process of matching jobs when submitting their own data, they can be sure that they are comparing similar roles when benchmarking pay rates.

In addition, they are able to:

• use XpertHR JobPricing to see their own pay rates for any given role compared with market rates;
  • Watch a video demonstration of XpertHR JobPricing
• make use of CELRE's personalised spreadsheet-based analytical tools MODAS and MIDAS to compare their organisational and individual pay rates.
  • Watch a video demonstration of MODAS

What does participation involve?
Participating in a CELRE salary survey does require some time and effort. However, the work involved is both reflected in the lower price charged to survey participants and rewarded by a far better and more powerful end product.

In addition, CELRE is able to offer first-time participants individual help to get to grips with the process, either by phone and email or with a site visit from our participation manager.

Once you sign up as a participating customer, you will be sent a "welcome" email along with a two-part questionnaire and guidance notes for the survey you have joined. The two elements of the questionnaire cover:

• company background information (such as turnover and number of employees); and
• individual employee pay data.

We would like you to submit data within six weeks of receiving this participation pack, or by the deadline for data collection if that is sooner.

CELRE salary surveys collect data on individual employees (suitably anonymised for data protection purposes). For each relevant employee covered by the survey, you will need to provide details of:

• basic salary;
• bonus and commission payments;
• shift allowances;
• company care allowances; and
• their place of work.

Additionally, you will need to go through a process CELRE calls JobMatching, which ensures that each job for which you submit data can be mapped to a standard set of job levels and job roles.

Definitions of the job levels and job roles used by CELRE are contained in the guidance notes that you receive with the questionnaire.

What happens next?
Once you have completed the questionnaire and returned it to CELRE, we run a series of checks to ensure that the data underlying our reports is robust.
Our validation checks identify possible anomalies in data. These may, for example, include:

• instances where an individual appears to be paid at an unusually high or low rate for their seniority level;
• cases where there are conflicts between different answers on the spreadsheet - such as where an individual is identified as a manager but appears not to manage any staff;
• unexpected year-on-year trends, where pay rates from one year's participation data do not appear to be consistent with the next year's submission.

All these queries are then flagged by CELRE and returned to the participating organisation, which then either confirms that the data submitted is accurate or is able to correct it.

Once these queries have been dealt with, the CELRE data team then carries out further audits and detailed analysis before producing the survey report, updating XpertHR JobPricing and producing spreadsheet-based analytical tools for individual organisations.