Does anyone have advice on setting salaries for a small business? This is for a family-owned company and they can't spend lots of money on surveys and can't compete with the big boys for all jobs. So, any suggestions for how to approach setting up a salary structure?

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Kate
HR Manager

This BLR site has the Salary Center that allows you to benchmark different positions based on place, size, and other demographics.

If you don't have the budget for surveys, that is definitely your best bet.

When you look at salary surveys, they will typically talk about the average size of the Company or give you oher good information so that you can scale accordnigly. The BLR salary survey provides pretty good, detailed information.

I agree with the other posters about using the salary survey on this website.  Another thing you can do is to watch the salary requirements of the people looking for positions that you are trying to fill.  If you use Careerbuilder, Monster, etc. and have the ability to search resumes, you can put in the key words for the positions you are trying to fill in your area and see what salaries these people are looking for.  I have used this in the past to see what other employers are paying (now keep in mind that some of this information may not be truthfully, as some candidates tend to overembelish their salaries, imagine that!!) but at least you can get an idea of what people are looking for.

Knowing that smaller companies also have smaller budgets, look at the positions that are most important to your company.  These are going to be the positions that you don't want to penny pinch on.  Some other positions you may be able to hire someone with less experience and train them, which will allow you to start their salary out lower than someone with experience.  Also look at other things you may be able to offer that would attract good candidates.  Can you raise the number of sick and vacation days you give your employees?  Can you offer a flexible schedule or work from home option?  What other perks like this could you offer that would be inexpensive?

 

For higher level jobs, I have found www.payscale.com to be a good source. It allows 5 free reports before you have to pay for any. I have used it for CEO, Executive Assistant, CFO, HR Director, etc.

I also look at job postings/resumes on Careerbuilder.com/Monster.com to see what ranges are offered.

One other thing we are doing as a small company is looking for people who live nearby. We emphasize things like "easy commute", "eat lunch at school with your kids", "attend other school functions", etc.  We allow for flex schedules where we can. 

 Also you might look to see if any of the colleges/universities have career centers that publish wage data for graduating students....i.e. what they actually received at their first job.

That said, the small employer culture is not for everyone.  And family-owned business can have a different political structure.  At least at ours, it takes a special type of employee to make it....especially with most of the management level being related or semi-related to the family.