Attract and retain top talent by advancing pay-for-skills

Agile workforce management requires identifying, keeping and moving skilled talent. Advancing pay-for-skills practices can secure top talent at competitive rates and help future-proof businesses.

Get clarity on salary benchmarking and rewards program with Mercer Skills-Edge Suite

Frameworks for rewards programs that fulfill businesses and employees

Only 14% of organizations have frameworks for acquiring skilled talent and structuring skills-based compensation.

Why is a skills framework necessary?

  • Provides clarity on how much to pay for critical skills
  • Brings transparency and lets employees know where they are at in terms of career progression
  • Aligns compensation and benefits with talent availability and job performance
  • Adjust rewards programs according to the market value of skills
  • Join 57% of organizations that already base salary benchmarking off skills

How compensation and benefits packages are evolving

  • Workforce management needs greater agility to identify, acquire, and retain high-demand talent.
  • Refining talent acquisition and retention strategies for the post-Covid landscape.
  • New salary benchmarks need to be built for increasingly prevalent digital skills, tech skills, and gig workers
Future proof your business with a skills-driven approach to compensation that helps you secure top talent with remuneration packages that stay within your budget. 

Mercer Skills-Edge Suite: Implement skills-based remuneration packages

Skills Library

The objective approach to skills-based decision making

Skills Library is a comprehensive database that maps 2,600 unique skills to over 5,300 jobs in the Mercer Job Library. Incorporate skills planning into your remuneration budget and talent strategy in no time with our skills adoption roadmap and skills tools.

Our Skills Library skills according to the following traditional metrics to help map out your current bench strength and identify the skills needed for your team to succeed:

  • Competency level
  • Qualifications & certifications
  • Hard & soft skills
  • Region-specific needs

Skills Pricer

Reward critical skills according to organizational impact

Skills Pricer is a self-service web application that gives insight into how skills influence the remuneration within individual jobs. Identify the skills which are most valuable to your organization with Mercer’s skills-based market approach to talent retention and acquisition.

Our interactive platform uses machine learning to provide the most accurate data on salary benchmarking, market demand, and how important skills are in comparison to one another.

Backed by real-time data inputs and Mercer’s Total Remuneration Surveys — the world’s most comprehensive source of salary data — our proprietary algorithm will offer reliable guidance on how much your organization should invest in rewarding, attracting, retaining, and upskilling talent.


Skills Pay Planner

Eliminate bias and uncertainty with objective pay-for-skills AI

Skills Pay Planner is an AI-driven tool that offers intelligent pay recommendations to individual employees based on skill premiums, budget, performance, and business strategy. 

Make informed decisions and eliminate individual bias during compensation planning reviews with Skills Pay Planner’s AI-driven pay suggestions that help automate compensation and benefits recommendations through algorithms that analyze and learn from your company’s data. 

Learn from historical data analytics, fine-tune your current business strategy, and improve retention strategies with Skills Pay Planner to prevent critical talent from becoming flight risks in the future.

Download our case study to find out how to kick start the process.

A large R&D organization in Singapore faced issues with developing an upskilling culture among its employees. Although the contributions of researchers working in the organization were paramount, the skills agenda was scattered and misaligned with employee pay and career scales.

Working together, Mercer and the R&D organization addressed a wide range of issues to achieve this fundamental transformation.

  • It’s difficult to attract and retain the skills required to transform for the future.
  • Our traditional compensation methods are not aligned with new workforce requirements for agility and flexibility.
  • The lack of transparency in our compensation programs is an obstacle to building employee trust with the organization.
  • We don’t know which skills are most valuable, and we’re concerned we’re over- or underpaying for the wrong skills.

Skills Library

Lay the groundwork for skills-based decision-making.

Learn more about Skills Library

   

Skills Map

Use review and approval workflows to map skills and proficiencies to your jobs.

Learn more about Skills Map

Skills Pricer

Determine which skills are most valuable to your organization.

Learn more about Skills Pricer

Skills pay planner

Reinvent your rewards with pay for skills.

Download Skills pay planner overview

Watch our interviews on approaches to skills-based pay

In this interview series, several Mercer consultants talk with IBM executives about the journey IBM has taken to plan and adopt a skills-based pay approach.

What set IBM on the path to include skills in compensation decisions?

Who were the critical stakeholders and how did you build your business case?

How did you manage the transition and change across the organization?

What were the business impacts and how did it affect recruiting and retention practices?

How did you link your performance review program to the pay-for-skills program?

Did the pay-for-skills program bring a pay change across all job families, including for soft skills?

How did employees react to the transition?

How do you see pay-for-skills developing in the future?

Watch the replay

Leading with a skills-powered strategy - One iteration at a time

Following the successful webinar, we are excited to share the accompanying workbook and recording. This engaging session delves into the impact of incremental progress, starting from the ideation stage and covering topics such as gaining buy-in, prioritizing investments and building a skills foundation.

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