Salary Benchmarking Matters. Here's How We Can Help.

When you’re hiring, you want to attract the right talent. Getting the salary and benefits package is obviously important, and these days, it’s not a nice-to-have anymore, it’s business-critical. If you offer too little, you might miss out on the expertise that you need. If you pay someone too much, you risk internal disparity and unsustainable costs in the long term.

This is where salary benchmarking comes in: this is a service we deliver for our clients who want to hire the best and be confident they’re offering a package that’s appealing in the current market.

 

What Is Salary Benchmarking?

In simple terms? Salary benchmarking is taking the time to compare your salary offerings against what the market is actually paying people for similar roles, in similar businesses, in your location. It makes you look beyond online averages and salary surveys, and gives you access to live, local data to gauge what it will actually take to attract the right person for the role you’re trying to fill.

At Sewell Wallis, we’ve got access to salary data from across the region. When we do benchmarking exercises, we use a mix of recently placed roles, info from our conversations with active candidates, and details of current market conditions across Yorkshire to give you an honest and evidence-based view of what you should be offering if you want to hire the best talent.

 

A recent example: benchmarking for a Transactional Finance Manager role

One of our manufacturing clients in South Yorkshire recently asked us to benchmark a new finance leadership role for them. The role required:

• An experienced finance professional with a strong track record in managing transactional finance teams
• Someone who had strong technical skills and was able to spend time doing hands-on accounting, but also teach these skills to a team
• Someone who had spent time managing and mentoring different streams of transactional finance staff, including purchase ledger, sales ledger and payroll.
• A candidate with a proven track record in being part of transforming teams
• Applicants who were happy in a role that was hybrid, with a minimum of three days a week in the office, able to work hands-on with their team

The organisation were going through a period of change and due to not hiring a role like this previously, they were unsure of how to approach the salary package; whether it should include any kind of bonus was a discussion we had with the hiring team.

They also struggled to offer complete remote working and wanted to ensure they were framing this in the correct way.

 

How We Approached It

To ensure we delivered a meaningful benchmark project, we drew on two main data sources:

Recently placed finance roles: we looked into similar roles we’d recently filled across South and West Yorkshire with comparable responsibilities, reporting lines, and team sizes

Active, qualified candidates: We drew on recent conversations with candidates currently in the market who were seeking roles of a similar level, looking into both their experience and salary expectations

 

What We Found

Our research identified that:

• Similar roles in other regions typically attracted higher salaries than South Yorkshire, though that gap is closing fast as we see employers in cities like Sheffield becoming increasingly competitive with Leeds and Manchester
• Candidates in the South Yorkshire region area with the required skillset were, on average, seeking packages around £49,000 plus benefits
• Comparable, recently filled senior finance roles were offering between £44,000 and £57,000 often with additional bonuses and benefits

 

The Final Benchmark

After we’d looked at responsibilities, candidate expectations and market trends, we advised a benchmarked salary range of £45,000 to £55,000 for this role.

We advised that this would ensure that our client could be competitive without overpaying and ensure it was an attractive offer to the relevant candidate pool.

 

Why This Matters

This is a prime example of how benchmarking isn’t just guesswork. We make data-driven decisions that serve to give you an edge in a competitive talent market. Whether you’re hiring for finance, HR or business support, benchmarking helps you:

• Attract stronger, better-matched candidates
• Reduce time to hire by aligning expectations with interested candidates from the word go
• Future-proof your hiring strategy against market shifts

 

Need Insight Like This?

If you're planning a hire and want to know what it’ll really cost to secure the talent you need, we can help. Our benchmarking service is discreet, data-led and tailored to your business and location.

Get in touch today to arrange a benchmarking exercise or an informal chat about your next hire.