Why Ravio is the best alternative to Mercer for salary benchmarking

Mercer is a well-known salary benchmarking data provider.

Mercer offers data via salary surveys: selling the results of their annual employer-reported Total Remuneration Survey (TRS). They also have Mercer Comptryx, an online compensation database for the tech industry which is updated once a quarter.

Sourcing salary benchmarking data from traditional HR consultancy providers like Mercer has been the default option in the past.

But, these providers come with many limitations.

The major issue is the manual and point-in-time nature of the salary survey approach, which results in error-prone and out-of-date salary data which is incredibly complex to interpret and use effectively – damaging the fairness and competitiveness of employee compensation. 

It’s no wonder People and Reward Leaders are looking for alternatives.

And there are some great alternatives out there.

Modern providers like Ravio offer real-time salary data which is sourced directly through HRIS integrations – meaning it’s always accurate and up-to-date. Plus, Ravio offers much more than just data, it’s an end-to-end platform for managing compensation.

In this article we’ll take a closer look at the pros and cons of Mercer for salary data, and the alternative options that could significantly strengthen your compensation approach.

What does Mercer do?

Mercer is a global HR consultancy firm that supports companies with the design and implementation of a huge variety of strategic projects, including compensation practices such as total rewards strategy, job evaluation, pension schemes, or employee benefits.

Alongside consultancy support, Mercer also offers various products and tools – including salary data. Mercer’s provides salary data in two core ways:

1. Salary survey data
2. Mercer Comptryx tech benchmarking platform

1. Mercer salary survey data

Salary survey data is Mercer’s core offering for salary benchmarking.

Mercer runs salary surveys, gathering submissions from companies on how they compensate their employees (base salary, equity, variable pay, benefits).

The results are used to produce a compensation dataset which is then sold on as benchmarking data for People and Reward teams to use.

Mercer runs many surveys and sells a huge variety of cuts of the data, such as:

• The Mercer Total Remuneration Survey (TRS) is the main global survey for total compensation data, updated once per year. 
• Industry-specific survey such as the Mercer Total Compensation Survey for the Energy Sector. 
• Employee-specific data such as the Mercer Hourly Pay Survey
• Insights on trending workplace topics such as the Mercer US Flexible Working Policies & Practices Survey. 

So there’s a lot to choose from – and it can feel very overwhelming.

In the past, salary survey data purchased from Mercer would have been delivered in a complex spreadsheet. 

Today, there’s the option to have the data delivered via Mercer WIN, Mercer’s online platform which enables users to view, filter, and analyse the salary survey data they’ve purchased in-platform, or download it as an Excel file. Mercer is a traditional consultancy firm, not a modern software solution, so the platform is pretty rough and ready.

2. Mercer Comptryx

Mercer acquired the Comptryx salary benchmarking software platform  in 2015, and it’s now widely known as Mercer Comptryx. 

Mercer Comptryx provides compensation benchmarking data for the tech industry. It provides market data on competitive compensation in the tech sector, as well as trends data for areas such as hiring rates, employee turnover, and gender distribution.

Mercer Comptryx operates on a give-to-get survey submission model. To gain access to the platform, companies provide a survey data submission on compensation for all employees, and this data is added to the platform, with quarterly data updates. There are currently 900 companies subscribed to the platform who have submitted data.

Why are users looking for alternatives to Mercer for salary benchmarking?

Whilst Mercer is a well-known name with historic credibility for salary benchmarking, there are many limitations which are leading People and Reward teams to look at alternatives.

The key limitations of Mercer for salary data are: 

• Point-in-time salary benchmarking data in spreadsheets. Mercer’s salary surveys are typically run annually and take months to deliver. The talent market can move quickly, so the data is out-of-date by the time it reaches you (and won’t be refreshed until the following year) which makes it unfit for use for companies who rely on fair and competitive compensation to attract and retain employees. Even the Mercer Comptryx software solution relies on manual survey submissions for data, which means there’s a lag before new data is added to the platform (on a quarterly basis). It also means that any updates made to employee compensation internally are not automatically reflected in the dataset.
• Manual data submission is time-consuming and introduces human error. Both Mercer’s salary surveys and Mercer Comptryx rely on users to submit their compensation data via manual survey submissions. The survey submission is detailed and lengthy, and the manual nature of data gathering means that human error is inevitable – impacting the accuracy of the data. 
• Complex and manual job matching. Mercer salary surveys have a huge number of global participants, many of which are large legacy companies with thousands of different job titles and job levels in their organisation structure. This makes salary survey submission complex and time-consuming, because you need to find the correct job code from the Mercer job library for every employee. It also adds to the unreliability of the final dataset – different participants will inevitably interpret the descriptions in different ways, making it impossible to ensure like-for-like comparison in the final data. The complex job matching also means that HR teams must also sift through a huge dataset to find the job roles and levels that are relevant for benchmarking their internal team.
• Difficult to compare external benchmarks with internal employee data. HR teams need to be able to easily compare benchmarks with their internal salary data to understand how competitive employee compensation is against the market. The only way to do this with Mercer is to manually combine Mercer’s data with internal HRIS data (and cap table if relevant) in a spreadsheet – which is time-consuming and needs to be regularly redone to reflect changes in employee data.
• Incomplete compensation management solution. Today we’re used to all-in-one tools – a HRIS that enables us to manage recruitment, onboarding, performance management, training, and more, all in one place. Mercer is a piecemeal solution, with compensation data as a standalone offering via salary surveys or Mercer Comptryx and additional products, such as a pay band tool or consultancy projects, offered separately. 

Why is Ravio a great alternative to Mercer for salary benchmarking?

With Ravio, this painful salary benchmarking process is no more.

Ravio provides accurate and always up-to-date total compensation data through direct integrations with HRIS tools – with 300,000+ data points from 1,000+ companies. The data is accessible at all times through a modern, user-friendly platform. Plus, Ravio also includes compensation management tools powered by the salary data, so it can be used to build visual salary bands, conduct compensation reviews, run pay equity audits, and more.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the key differences between Mercer and Ravio as salary data providers.

Mercer vs Ravio for salary benchmarking – at a glance

Here’s a quick snapshot of the key features that make Ravio a great alternative to Mercer for salary data – before we look at more details for each one:

Key feature 1: real-time salary data via HRIS integrations

Ravio sources compensation data direct from source. Participating companies integrate their Ravio account with their company’s HRIS where salary data is stored, with 33 existing integrations for popular tools like HiBob, Personio, and Workday.

Through the direct integration, any changes made – if new hires join the company, for instance, or if a compensation review takes place and salaries are adjusted – are automatically reflected in Ravio’s salary database. 

Ravio’s compensation benchmarks, therefore, are always up-to-date, enabling companies to ensure that employee compensation always remains fair and competitive against a quickly-changing talent market. 

Ravio also harnesses the real-time database to highlight other key trends in the market, including hiring rates, attrition rates, and annual salary increases.

This compares to Mercer’s point-in-time data gathered through salary survey submissions which are updated either once a quarter (for Mercer Comptryx) or, most commonly, once per year (for most Mercer salary surveys). 

Key feature 2: accurate salary data with no risk of human error

Connecting directly with company HR systems also eliminates the need for manual inputs because the salary data is automatically gathered from source. This approach eliminates the risk of human error that comes with manual data entry. 

Plus, all data that enters Ravio also goes through verification by a team of in-house compensation data experts. This improves accuracy in two key ways. Firstly, any potential errors in the original HRIS data are flagged and checked with the company. Secondly, data is checked for labelling consistency, ensuring that job roles, levels, etc are always interpreted in the same way by each company that is added to the database.

Manual data entry is a key component of Mercer’s salary benchmarking approach due to the salary survey submissions used to build the database – the process used both for standard salary surveys and for Mercer Comptryx too. 

Key feature 3: relevant data pool and filters always available 

Relevant data is vital to ensure that compensation is competitive with the companies that you compete for talent against – typically companies with a similar profile to yours. 

Ravio’s compensation benchmarking data features over 300,000 data points sourced from over 1,000 companies – and advanced statistical analysis and modelling is used to ensure accurate benchmarks are available even for less common roles. Ravio users can always filter the data based on location, industry, funding stage, and headcount, to ensure the benchmarks and job roles are highly relevant.

As we’ve seen, ensuring relevant data is much trickier with Mercer, with the broad data pool skewed towards large legacy industries and additional costs for slicing the data into a more relevant pool. 

Key feature 4: automated mapping to a best-practice level framework

Every company that joins Ravio is automatically mapped against Ravio’s level framework. 

This is a critical step for reliable compensation benchmarking, because it means that data is always labelled consistently within the platform. This removes the risk of different companies interpreting job role or level descriptions differently and, therefore, ensures apples-to-apples comparisons when using the data for benchmarking.

With Mercer, customers are left alone to map their internal frameworks against a highly complex job library – inevitably causing inconsistencies in how job roles and levels are interpreted and, therefore, greatly reducing accuracy.

Key feature 5: comprehensive compensation management platform and expert support

Salary benchmarking data is a foundational piece in any company’s compensation strategy. It’s used to build salary bands, it’s refreshed each year as part of a large-scale compensation review, it’s analysed for pay equity and gender pay gap reporting obligations, and much more.

Today People and Reward leaders are looking for comprehensive solutions for compensation management to eliminate reliance on spreadsheets without the need to switch between five new tools for different processes.

Ravio offers this: an end-to-end compensation management platform that equips teams with everything they need to build and manage robust compensation practices

This includes benchmarking, salary bands, compensation cost modelling, pay and performance reviews, gender pay gap analysis and reporting, and more. 

Other Mercer alternatives for compensation data

If you’re looking to evaluate all of your options, there are many providers on the market today for salary benchmarking. 

They split into three main groups:

1. Traditional salary survey providers (like Mercer)
2. HR platforms with third-party salary data 
3. Salary benchmarking software providers (like Ravio).

Many companies also use desk research on job adverts and employee-reported salaries for benchmarking, but this is not recommended.

Mercer alternatives: other traditional salary survey providers

Mercer is just one of several HR consultancies who provide salary data through traditional salary surveys, with others including:

• Radford
• Willis Towers Watson
• Korn Ferry
• Culpepper
• Salary.com
• Empsight
• Altura
• Brightmine (previously XpertHR and Cendex)

Some of these providers today have a platform for analysing the provided salary survey data – but these are consultancies, not software companies, so the platforms tend to be outdated and difficult to use.

Mercer alternatives: third-party data providers

There are many HRIS and compensation tools who do not have their own salary benchmarking database, but still want to offer comprehensive features for compensation, and so partner with data providers like Mercer Comptryx to integrate third-party salary data into their platform.

Platforms that include Mercer Comptryx salary data as third-party data include:

• Lattice
• HiBob
• Leapsome
• Barley
• Comprehensive
• Zendesk

Mercer alternatives: salary benchmarking software providers

Alongside Ravio, there are other salary benchmarking tools on the market today which offer a modern software alternative to the salary survey approach. Most of these providers also include additional compensation management features.

Mercer alternatives in this category include:

• Ravio (global salary data, strongest for Europe)
• Pave (global salary data, strongest for US/Canada)
• Compa (offers data only)
• CompUp (India only)
• Figures (Europe only, strongest for France)
• Carta (US VC-backed companies only)
• Assemble (Biotech only)
• Compensation IQ by Qlearsite (Europe only, mostly public sector and charity)

There are also other software solutions who offer compensation management tools but without compensation benchmarking data – like Complete and Beqom.

Mercer alternatives: job adverts and employee-reported data

Some companies use desk research to find user-reported salary benchmarking data.

This salary data comes from job adverts with salary ranges on sites like LinkedIn or Indeed, or from sites like Glassdoor which ask employees to anonymously report their salary. 

These are not reliable sources for salary data. 

Job adverts tell you how one company has benchmarked the salary range for a particular role. There’s huge variance in how each company produces their new hire salary range, and you have none of the context on their compensation philosophy.

User-reported data is crowdsourced, unverified, and never updated – salaries given on sites like Glassdoor reflect an average of all data ever submitted for that role, not an up-to-date view of the market today.

It’s always worth the cost of paying for access to compensation benchmarking data from a trusted provider.