This document discusses the importance of conducting compensation benchmarking or salary surveys. Surveys provide insights into compensation practices, performance measures and results, benefits plans, and guidelines used by competitors. They allow companies to assess how competitive their pay levels, groups, and overall organization are. Common types of surveys include government, subscription, custom, online self-reported, practices, pulse, and job matching surveys. When selecting data for a survey sample, factors like company size, geographic area, industry, company type, and date of the survey should be considered. Elements typically covered in compensation surveys include base salary, total cash compensation, and benefits. An effective peer group for comparison should be from a large sample, consistent in size and scope as the