Staffing Experience

Monday, April 9, 2007

Every company has their own way of defining experience levels. For example, some companies may consider a Junior level to represent 0 – 1 years of experience while another company may consider a Junior level to have 1 – 3 years of experience. nextSource has created one process that works even if the job/applicant market has no banding definition at all. Career banding is a human resources and procurment system that affects the classification, hiring, pay, promotion, evaluation, and career development opportunities for employees. The benefits of banding include increased flexibility for managers to adjust pay for eligible employees, and making is easer for employees to move up throught the pay range by acquiring and demonstrating new job-related competencies, education, or training. Career banding can attract and keep more talented employees by opening up potential for career advancement.

Regardless of how a company defines experience level banding, one pattern emerges: the lower the experience level, the lower the rate or salary and the higher the experience level, the higher the rate or salary. This is the basic premise that allows nextSource to examine and categorize the unbanded marketplace. Using the following methodology it is possible to define experience level banding against the un-banded marketplace and satisfy the demands of all companies regardless of the experience levels that they may use.

nextSource has found that a natural segmentation occurs among the experience years and related rate or salary that they have been able to capture in their methodology for experience banding. Identifying the rate and salary limits associated with this segmentation is the exercise of the banding utilized within The People Ticker. The People Ticker incorporates default assumptions about the unbanded job/applicant marketplace based on this segmentation. For example, the segmentation assumptions reflect that the pay rates falling in the lowest 25% of the reported pay rates are representative of pay rates for a Junior experience level while the top 10% of the pay rates (between 90% and 100% of pay rates reported) are representative of the GURU experience level. In its segmentation assumptions, The People Ticker uses a total of four experience levels. The corresponding banding ranges applicable to each experience level are defined below:

• Junior: 0% - 25% of Pay Rates Reported


• Mid-Level: 25% - 50% of Pay Rates Reported


• Senior: 50% - 90% of Pay Rates Reported


• Guru: 90% - 100% of Pay Rates Reported

Experience Level banding in the marketplace is defined as a function of Pay Rate Range. Professionals who have been defined as Senior by companies will fall to the higher end of the banding scale than professionals companies have defined as Junior which will fall to the lower end of the banding scale.