Dive Brief:
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In what the company says is an effort to help close the gender pay gap, Zenefits has announced a salary tool that will allow its clients to compare salaries with each other.
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The tool, Compensation Management, will allow employers to browse salaries offered by other Zenefits users in similar industries, according to the company. Employers can then examine their own salaries by demographic information — including by gender — and by department, role and location, Zenefits said in a press statement. HR professionals can see other employers' rates of pay in the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles and use the information to inform their own salary decisions. The tool will cost employers $4 per month per employee to use, according to Matt Ketchum, a product marketing leader at Zenefits.
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ADP and other human resources management SaaS companies have similar salary comparison tools. Zenefits' tool was designed for companies with 500 employees or fewer and runs on datasets created from its own anonymized user data, according to the statement.
Dive Insight:
The release of this tool signifies a larger trend in compensation and employment: the integration of HR tech and data analytics to help inform personnel decisions, even at the recruiting stage. More job sites, including LinkedIn, are opting to show "salary insights" or make public the projected salary ranges of certain job offerings. Employees increasingly expect more transparency on the issue of salary, and employers that don’t answer that call may witness retention issues.
According to Daniel Speros, director of HR product and services at Zenefits, the tool has the potential to help employers unearth existing gender pay discrepancies and be proactive about setting fair salaries based on industry standards, thus avoiding potential retention issues outright.
"In a sense, a complaint is still better than the alternative, where the employee just leaves or becomes disengaged," Speros said of underpaid employees. "Some people might see it as getting a good deal on someone, but if the person is not being paid appropriately for the work that they do, you're creating areas of inequality within the company and a retention risk — in the sense that another employer might value that person appropriately and steal them away."
Correction: In a previous version of this article, the price of this new tool was incorrect. The price is $4 per employee per month.