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HR is brutal when it comes to setting salaries for people. What are their qualifications to know about market rate salaries etc? Many of them come from labor and employment relations majors and are trying to use their position to right grievances regardless of qualifications blind to race etc.

I cannot speak for ALL HR people or for what goes on at ALL companies but at my last job I was asked to take over the “salary administration” role, in addition to my role as PR and HRIS manager. I have a background in both HR and in Benefits administration and prior to that in corporate accounting, so I’m more of a number cruncher type, a very analytical type, sort of a geek in that respect.

For me it had nothing to do with righting grievances or ignoring qualifications but it was blind to race, age, gender. The job description, the qualifications and experience, educational level, etc. in the written job description was what dictated the salary range and either the applicants met the requirements of the job description or they didn’t. I actually found that new part of my job quite interesting and challenging and FWIW I did a very good job in that role.

Setting market rates for jobs, while not always an exact science, does rely on hard data. I had subscriptions to 3 different job/salary range databases, two of which were geared toward manufacturing. And I could, if necessary also use an outside consultant to determine the market rate for a new position if I couldn’t find a comparable in any of my databases and could also use my membership in SHRM for additional research. When grading a new job, I often used multiple sources and then averaged them out to come up with a reasonable salary grade.

All job titles were tied to a job description and in turn, each job title was assigned to a salary range based on the most current market data based on the job description. And every two years or so we re-evaluated them and upgraded or downgraded ranges if necessary. Hourly positions both in admin and in manufacturing jobs were tied to local market rates as recruiting was local. But for some positions; upper management, executive and for higher level engineering and scientific positions, the salary range might reflect a broader and a higher range given that we may have to recruit on a national basis which may also factor in re-location expenses and industry norms for bonuses.

I had some hiring managers who would submit to me, a new job description for a new position which I would have to review and approve, i.e. making sure the job description included all the necessary components and met our template and format for consistency and that the job title and the job description matched and made sense before assigning it to a salary range and before passing it on to the recruitment team.

So for instance if a new job title was Manufacturing Process Engineer I but in the newly written job description, the requirements as to years of experience and education levels was equal to or more than the existing job title and the existing job description for a Manufacturing Process Engineer II, I’d reject it and work with the manager to either re-write the new job description or get them to consider that what they actually needed and were looking for was a Manufacturing Process Engineer II. Or perhaps even look at and re-evaluate the Manufacturing Process Engineer II salary grade if it was out of date.

I also recall a job description that was submitted to me by a manger for salary grading for a Polymer Plastics Chemist. The job description as written by the manager required 10+ years of experience and a PhD as opposed to a BS and a big laundry list of achievements including holding patents for new polymer plastics formulations. When I gave the manager the commensurate salary range based on the job description he wrote and based on both local and national market data, he freaked out and said he only wanted to pay a salary at half that range because he had a budget.

I had to tell him, (and also after consulting with the HR Director and with our outside recruiting firm for those types of specialized positions), that he’d either have to find more room in his budget or he’d have to re-write the job description and lower his expectations because it would be a waste of everyone’s time - HR’s time, the recruiter’s time and the applicant’s time, to try to recruit someone with that level of experience and with a PhD, but only offer half of what the market said that job paid.

FWIW, we also had some hiring managers who would interview and vette qualified pre-screened applicant after applicant after applicant, sometimes having them come in for multiple interviews, sometimes for higher level positions, flying them in and putting them up in a hotel at our expense, but would then drag their feet on making a hiring decision. Then they’d come back to HR to ask us to make a job offer to a candidate that had interviewed with us 3-6 months earlier and the manager was somehow amazed and perplexed that the applicant was no longer interested or available and had already accepted another position elsewhere, but then tried to blame HR for not being able to fill the position.

So yes, HR is always at fault and they (we) are always the bad guys or gals / s