3 Ways to Grow Your Business with Real-Time Wage Data

Since Colorado’s pay transparency law took effect in 2021, nine other states and Washington, DC, have passed and / or implemented similar pay transparency legislation (in total, 24 percent of the US population lives in a state where salary transparency is mandated).

One outcome is that job listings are much more likely to include salary information than they were five years ago. In fact, as of Q3 2024, about 43 percent of all US job listings included salary information.

That’s great news for workplace equality, which was the original intent of many state laws. But this level of salary transparency also provides something else: valuable business intelligence for a variety of companies.

In this piece, we’ll look at three use cases where the real-time wage data included in job listings can help businesses grow. (Note: job postings often include more data than a simple statement of an hourly wage – in many cases, postings list a wage range, information about sign-on bonuses, details on benefits packages, and more.)

Use Case 1: Attract and Retain Top Industry Talent

In industries with high turnover (senior living, retail, restaurants, warehouses, etc.), companies often spend more than they’d like on recruitment. In the most frustrating cases, new hires defect to competitors shortly after starting to take advantage of a slightly higher salary.

Real-time wage data can address that and other problems. Specifically, it can…

• Save HR teams hours. Too often, hiring teams are forced to comb job boards for hours or even days in search of reliable salary information in comparable job postings. The goal, of course, is to identify a salary that’s competitive but that won’t erode margins (Figure 1).
• Reduce time to hire for open roles. When your salary and benefits package is competitive, you’re better able to attract and retain top talent. This should decrease the time it takes to hire for open positions.
• Improve retention. By tracking industry wages and benefits in real time, you’ll be well aware of emerging trends as they emerge. This gives you time to adjust wages and benefits internally, if necessary, to keep up with the evolving realities of your industry.

Figure 1: Median LPN salaries across Los Angeles cities

Note, of course, that wage and benefits offerings vary greatly by geography. For real-time wage data to be most valuable, it should be local to your metro area so you’re considering the same competitive employers as the people applying for your open jobs.

Use Case 2: Enhance A Data-Powered Product You Sell

Real-time wage data is powerful on its own. It can be even more powerful in conjunction with other industry-relevant data. That’s exactly what LivingPath, a company that offers competitive data for the senior housing market, discovered.

For years, LivingPath offered its customers access to data such as…

• Room rates.
• Occupancy.
• Leasing incentives.
• Wages.

Community operators and investors use the data to guide decisions about hiring, investment, new construction, and more. But until recently, the wage data LivingPath offered was gathered manually.

When real-time wage data became more widely available thanks to increasing pay transparency laws, the LivingPath team saw an opportunity to incorporate this data into its offering. Now, the wage data portion of its data suite (which comes from our WagePulse tool) is much more comprehensive, offering data from more than 185,000 corporate career sites across industries, job titles, geography, and more.

And because the wage data is updated once a day every day, LivingPath’s customers are able to…

• Compare job listings in real-time.
• Compare salaries by market (country, state, metro, city, or postal code).
• See both listed salaries and salaries paid.
• View salary trends over time (Figure 2).
• Set wages based on current trends.
• Offer competitive wages when hiring

Figure 2: Median CNA salaries over time, entire United States

If you sell access to data or sell products greatly informed by data, you may also be able to enhance your offering by upgrading to a source of wage data that’s more comprehensive and updated more frequently.

Use Case 3: Reduce Attrition in High-Turnover Roles

Large enterprises often rely on thousands of entry-level employees to do essential work in call centers, warehouses, retail floors, and elsewhere. These roles tend to have high turnover, often because workers are likely to leave if they can earn higher wages elsewhere.

For roles that provide on-the-job training, attrition can be particularly high; in those cases, employers have to contend not only with their direct competition but also with their “talent competition” for workers. That is, an insurance call center might be competing not only with other insurance call centers for employees but also with front-of-house roles at Target and even seasonal Amazon roles.

For these enterprises, real-time wage data can be used to reduce attrition and so reduce the associated costs.

You might build a “call center wages” dashboard, for example, that includes real-time wage data for the metro area for any role that might compete for call center talent. Such a dashboard might be supplemented by data on the current number of job listings at various competitor organizations and other relevant data.

The dashboard could thus provide real-time insights into opportunities for “poaching” talent and areas of concern for retaining talent, empowering you to make proactive decisions to attract and retain workers.

How to Access Real-Time Wage Data to Grow Your Business

Our WagePulse tool provides access to real-time wage data that’s customizable by geography, industry, company, and more. We make it available in custom-built dashboards and as raw data, to be incorporated into existing tools and dashboards.

If you’re interested in seeing a sample of our data, get in touch. We’d be happy to set you up with a free, month-long trial so you can get a sense of how real-time wage data might impact your operations.

Not sure wage data is right for you? Get a sense of how other types of labor market data can help you grow.