Salary Pulse Methodology
1. Introduction
Salary Pulse app serves the Serbian IT companies with the compensation and benefits benchmark. The benchmark data are based on the inputs provided by the companies via the app and the number of salary entries grows each day. Updated list of participating companies and the number of salary entries at each given point can be tracked here.
The benchmark data for participating companies will give information about the salary gap between the current employee salary and the target percentile salary. Each employee’s compensation and benefits data will be compared against the City (office the employee works in), Industry the company operates in, the Main skill the employee owns, Bonuses. Moreover detailed analysis on a team and department level is presented together with the benefits analysis and benchmark among different seniority levels within the same job title of the employee.
In addition to data for its own employees, companies can also access general benchmark representing median, average, 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th Salary percentile together with the bonuses information per each job title in Salary Pulse database. Users can filter the data based on the inputs of their interest when it comes to certain cities, industries, company types, company sizes etc.
Salary update by each participating company is required on a 6-month period and is needed for each individual salary record (for each salary employee). Other than the salary inputs, companies participating in the benchmark are also updating their profiles regularly and do provide an annual survey answers on hiring plans questions.
2. Data handling
The data acquired via the platform goes through several checks making sure the data is valid and checked against human errors. When calculations for the benchmark are performed, the system will exclude or replace extreme values in order to provide accurate and relevant data.
In order to keep the secrecy of the company’s salary data, the benchmark for specific job title and seniority won’t be presented in case there are less than 5 companies participating with its data for that specific job title and seniority in the requested benchmark.
Mapping of the job titles and seniorities is under user’s responsibility but goes in line with Salary Pulse guidance and checks.
A job title might have assigned seniority levels mapped to better distinguish skill set needed for a specific job title. Levels differ per job title going to a maximum of 6 levels for Software Development job titles. Job titles might also have main skills assigned, only in those cases where the Main skill also dictates the difference in salary.
In addition to salary data, companies also provide Bonuses data which represents the sum of all allowances that goes on top of the employee salary. While salary is on a monthly level, bonuses are represented on a yearly time period.
Benefits are collected on 47 pre-defined benefits listed, where company will select benefits for all employees but can also emphasize if certain benefits are only for certain seniority level, office, job title or Company Department.
3. Data representation
Salary Pulse benchmarks, depending on the user access levels, usually contains data about Salary:
- Salary Net – The amount an employee takes home after deductions
- Salary Gross 1 – Represents the amount when taking net earnings on which taxes and contributions are paid by the employee
- Salary Gross 2 – Represents the amount when taking gross 1 and social contributions paid by the employer
- Average Salary - Average Salary is an arithmetic mean of all reported salaries for a given position and seniority level
- Median Salary –Median Salary is the Salary amount that divides employees into two equally-sized groups, half having salary above that amount, and half having salary below that amount. It may differ from Average Salary and sometimes it’s more accurate than the Average Salary because it doesn’t take into account the extreme values.
- xth percentile: 100/x of all reported salaries for a given job title and seniority lie below this value. Paying at the xth percentile rate means that x% of companies in the relevant sample pay less than that amount and (100-x)% of companies pay more than that amount for the given job title and seniority. Below-market salary range is a range that falls on or below the 25th percentile (25th and 10th percentile column values). Mid-market salary range is a range that falls on the 50th percentile, and Above-market salary range is a range that falls on or above the 75th percentile (75th and 90th percentile column values).
In addition to Salary, Bonuses benchmark is shown as individual amount broken down into:
- Bonus Net - The bonus amount an employee takes home after deductions
- Bonus Gross 1 - Represents the bonuses amount when taking net bonuses on which taxes and contributions are paid by the employee
- Bonus Gross 2 - Represents the bonuses amount when taking gross 1 and social contributions paid by the employer
In overall general benchmark, the bonus amount is shown as summed up with the salary amount.
As already explained, If less than 5 companies provided salary data for the given job title and seniority - regardless of the number of salary entries (which can be greater than 5) - the salaries were not calculated for that job title and seniority and are marked with “n/a“, indicating insufficient data.