Labor Titan FAQ

What is Labor Titan?

A compensation benchmarking, forecasting and management solution designed to simplify all components of internal pay setting and external/market pay trend tracking.

How can Labor Titan help me?

There are two major problems with market wage data and analytics:
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1) Timely and reliable market wage data is hard to get
2) Effectively analyzing market wage data is difficult

Labor Titan makes both easy by focusing on 1) augmenting your existing compensation management capabilities and 2) making it easy to calibrate your wage figures with the market.

We help you make better, faster, more confident compensations decisions that help you win the battle for talent.

Who can benefit from Labor Titan?

Anyone that would find value in market wage data, analytics, and forecasts including:

- Employers, specifically HR, compensation, finance professionals and CFO’s
- Workforce development boards
- Economic development teams
- Site selection teams
- Industry association
- Staffing firms
- Individuals
- Recruiters
- Education

What countries does Labor Titan provide data for?

We are focused on the United States

How does work leveling work? Is it a credible process?

Labor Titan uses a point factor leveling system for jobs. In point factor leveling, an occupation is matched to a level within five different factors. The factors are:
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- Knowledge
- Job controls and complexity
- Contacts (nature and purpose)
- Physical environment
- Supervisor Responsibilities

While the goal of a standardized work leveling system is to be as objective as possible, there is still an element of judgment. When work leveling, it is a good practice to use the same evaluators to build objectivity and consistency in the leveling process.

Will Labor Titan map my jobs to occupations and work levels for me?

Due to the unique knowledge you have about your specific jobs, customers need to map their jobs to a standard occupation code and work level their roles.

What are MSA’s? Why does Labor Titan provide wages at this level of detail?

A metropolitan statistical area (MSA) is a geographical region with a relatively high population density at its core and close economic ties throughout the area.

MSAs are defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and used by the Census Bureau and other federal government agencies for statistical purposes. As of 2021, ~85% of the US population is in the 384 US MSA’s.

Why Use MSA’s To Define Local Markets?

Due to their population density, MSA’s are large enough to reliably segment and forecast with accuracy and confidence. They are also small enough to define a local job market as the labor force within an MSA tends to be willing to travel across an MSA for better job opportunities and pay.

What are standard occupation codes? Is it a reliable job classification system?

Labor Titan leverages the US Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system. It is a federal statistical standard used by federal agencies to classify workers into occupational categories for the purpose of collecting, calculating, or disseminating data. All workers are classified into one of 867 detailed occupations according to their occupational definition.

What are Labor Titan's data sources?

We leverage over 50 public and private data sources. The BLS Occupational Employment and Wages Survey is a significant piece of the puzzle.

While this dataset is great, there are some major challenges with it:

- The day the data is released it is already a year old.
- The data can be heavily suppressed and have significant information gaps.
- There are no occupational local wage or local employment forecasts.
- The information is extremely unwieldy, needing a lot of data modeling, cleanup, and standardization if you are looking at trends over time.
- It needs to be effectively combined with other unrelated datasets to really extract where wages are at.
- It is challenging to consistently map your internal job levels to percentile wages. This makes it difficult to ensure you are comparing apples to apples on market pay.

Labor Titan solves all these problems for you.

‍We solve these challenges by using other public data sources from the BLS, Census, Department of Labor, BEA and O*NET. We also heavily leverage private data from a variety of sources.

What level of detail do you offer?

We provide real time historical & forecasted data at the following level of detail:

- Geography: MSA/metro level
- Detailed Occupation: Accountant, Analyst, Customer Service Rep, etc
- Work Level: Entry level to expert level
- Perspective: Compensation (Wages/Salary)
- Forecast: 1 year of forecasts available online, 2 years of forecasts via custom projects
- History: Online platform focuses on current month market wage data. Data back to 2011 is available via custom projects.

How often is your data updated?

Monthly for benchmarks, quarterly for forecasts.

How old is your benchmark data?

When we release our benchmark data it is typically a month old. This means that our benchmark data is never more than 2 months old (1 month market lag and 1 month data aging).

How do you create your wage forecasts?

Our proprietary, leading indicator based forecasting process leverages economics, data science, analytics, advanced modeling, and a variety of datasets including:
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- Inflation estimates
- Economic trends
- Demographic shifts
- People and job migratory patterns
- Job postings from major job sites
- Intel and data from public entities like the Dept of Labor, BEA, Census, BLS, Federal Reserve, and more
- Partnerships with 3rd parties that grant access to exclusive data and market intelligence

The result is the first ever local occupational wage forecasts by work level.

How far out do your forecasts go?

Our online forecasts go out 12 months from the current benchmarking data.

Example: If the current benchmark data is as of July 2023 the forecasts will be as of July 2024.

24 month forecasts are available via a custom report request.

How is your data different from traditional wage surveys?

The largest benefit over traditional wage surveys is our benchmark data is updated monthly instead of annually like most surveys.

Wage surveys can be an excellent tool in the compensation decision making toolbox. However, it is wise to acknowledge that they are not a panacea. Challenges with typical wage surveys include:

- Sample sizes tend to be small, especially for industry association surveys
- Expensive to conduct, high price to access
- Updated infrequently, age out quickly
- Generic job descriptions, manual mapping to internal jobs
- Pay percentiles don’t cleanly map to work levels
- Typically lack geographical/local metro detail due to confidentially requirements
- Industry specific focus. This is dangerous when an occupation can easily move into another industry. Common with industry association surveys.

Labor Titan can augment your current salary surveys by addressing the challenges above quickly, easily, and economically.

The market wages presented are far off from what I expected. Why is this?

It is essential to make sure your job is mapped to the correct occupation code. Having the incorrect occupation code mapping for your job is the most common reason for this.
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Next you need to ensure your work level selections are correct. You might think your job is a mid level role, but withink the conext of the market it might actually be an upper mid level job. Depending on the role, a change of a work level or two could be a difference of $10,000+ annually.

A free way to do a quick sanity check is to look up the occupation on the BLS website. Be aware that the BLS occupational data could be up to two years old depending on when you look at it.

As the largest US wage survey in existence, it is a free, quick, and reliable way to independently stress test both Labor Titan and your internal numbers.

General

Data

Credits

Market Data Segmentation

Non Fixed Compensation

Additional Labor Titan Services

Compensation Simplified