Salary surveys are old marketing, right? Actually, far from it. Even in today’s digital age they remain one of the most effective sources of warm client and candidate leads.

The key to getting results out of salary surveys is to modernise the approach. The large agencies have been producing sizable hard copy reports for many years. They’ve obviously updated this approach a little and made them available online – providing the user enters their details!

The big difference now is that there is no need to spend an eternity collating and producing all of the statistics, only to find out that you have half-data or missing results.

To get the most out of your recruitment agency’s salary survey, the key is to do two things: have an online tool that provides the participant with some form of instant gratification, and produce one or more offline and online reports that report on the trends in the data.

Online Tool

The volume of people searching online for salary data, either as a job seeker or employer, is only just behind the volume of people searching for jobs. The big difference is that many of these people may not be quite ready to search for jobs, so their details can potentially be captured at an earlier stage. One look at the suggested search results in Google gives you some idea what people are looking for:

You can see from the above searches that people are searching quite specifically for data. They are no longer prepared to settle for vague data that lists them with every other person with the same job title in the same city. This change in demand is due largely to a change in consumer behaviour. The good news is that this leaves a gap for niche salary survey tools that target your agency’s unique specialisation, location or industry.

There are several salary survey tools available, all of which can be purchased on monthly subscriptions. Some also have a setup fee, and then depending on the tool they can be rebranded to look and feel like they belong to your agency. The major difference between the tools is that some require you to share your data, and the ownership remains with the vendor, whereas others are hosted for you but everything (including the data) remains your intellectual property. It’s also important to look at how much customisation is possible, especially around the specific questions. After all, the questions asked in Executive are going to be significantly different from those in Blue Collar sectors.

Whatever the tool, it is crucial that they offer immediate value to the user. In today’s digital age, people want instant results and will skip anything that doesn’t offer this in favour of something that does. As an example, our tool provides the user with an exact indication of how their salary compares directly to people with the same job title in the same region or even sub-sector of that region.

Salary Report

The purpose of publishing a report is centred around clients. Whilst clients will enter their own salary data (everyone is a candidate after all!), there is more value for them in seeing data comparisons so they can see compensation levels for their teams. There are three ways reports can be used to attract and engage clients. The first is to have the report available online so employers searching for data will find it and then have to enter their details to download it (an instant BD lead!). Some recruitment agencies use salary reports as sales enablement tools for their recruiters; producing the report but not marketing it, and tasking the recruiters with organising as many client meetings as possible to walk through the results. The most time-intensive use is to host an event to discuss the report’s findings and any other items of interest. These may take a while to organise, but they are a great platform and provide fantastic one on one time with clients.

Producing reports from a good online salary tool is fairly easy. For example, our tool offers a simple CSV/Excel export function. This data can then be sorted and filtered to suit your needs. Some recruiters choose to produce one large report, others break the findings into smaller reports or snapshots. Either is a good option, so do what best suits your business.



Two examples of our online salary tool can be viewed here and here. If you’d like more information on having your own Salary Survey Tool, please feel free to contact us.