Methodology Preview:Functional families and class counts are modeled to the City of Gainesville's ~570 classifications and ~1,500 employees per RFP HRDX-260051-WB. Salary, benefit, and pension figures shown here are illustrative, with production data populated from the City HRIS, the City's pension plans, the collective bargaining agreements, and the Florida comparator jurisdictions' adopted pay plans at engagement award.

HSG Methodology Demo

City of Gainesville · RFP HRDX-260051-WB

Why Pay Studies Age

A study is a snapshot. Pay is a moving target.

The hardest part of a compensation study is not the study; it is keeping pay competitive after the consultant leaves. A full-service city that lets its structure drift falls behind on recruitment and retention, then pays for another full re-study to catch up. RFP §2.2 asks for exactly the fix: system recommendations for ongoing market pay-data review. This page is how we design the study so it stays useful for years, not months.

How a pay structure drifts out of date

The market moves

Peer cities adjust pay every budget cycle. A structure benchmarked once is already trailing by the next fiscal year, and the gap compounds.

Compression re-forms

Off-cycle raises, counteroffers, and minimum-wage floors lift the bottom of ranges without lifting the top, quietly recreating the compression a study was built to fix.

Ad-hoc fixes accumulate

Between studies, urgent one-off adjustments to hard-to-fill roles pile up outside the structure, until the plan on paper no longer matches what people are paid.

Job content changes

Duties drift, new technology arrives, and titles multiply. Descriptions written once fall out of alignment with the work actually performed.

The design

Six things a durable study must do.

Build for maintenance, not just a snapshot.

A static 200-page report drifts the moment it is delivered. A city that has to commission a full re-study every few years is paying a subscription to the same problem.

What we do: We deliver an ongoing market-data maintenance system the City operates between studies, so the structure stays current instead of drifting until the next costly re-study. This is exactly what RFP §2.2 asks for.

Benchmark against live, current pay plans.

A market gap measured on data that is several wage cycles old understates the real gap. Florida wages and peer-city pay have moved quickly, and public-safety and skilled-trades premiums move fastest.

What we do: We benchmark against the comparators' current adopted pay plans, pulled from the public record, not a snapshot that is already stale.

Match the comparator pool to the competitive reality.

A pool that is too wide or size-mismatched distorts the midpoints that decide who gets a raise and how much. Gainesville competes for talent with specific Florida cities and with Alachua County, not with every jurisdiction in the state.

What we do: We build a function-matched Florida pool weighted to full-service cities that run transit, public safety, and utilities, plus the home county, so the midpoints reflect the market Gainesville actually recruits in.

Model an uneven market, not a flat lattice.

Real market premiums are not uniform. Police and fire, RTS operators, licensed water and wastewater staff, building inspectors, and IT security carry steeper premiums than a flat step between grades can hold. A uniform lattice can re-create the compression it was meant to fix.

What we do: We model market movement at the job-family level and run a dedicated compression analysis, including the supervisory compression and the Staff Specialist / Executive Assistant grade fixes the RFP calls out.

Segment for a multi-union, full-service city.

A single general plan plus a public-safety plan under-segments a city with seven bargaining agreements, a regional transit system on federal rules, and Chapter 175/185 police and fire pensions. Those do not slot cleanly into two buckets.

What we do: Our sixteen-family architecture handles police, fire, transit, utilities, and the rest on their own terms, with FLSA determined for every title and bargaining-unit grade placement respected.

Leave something durable behind.

The RFP asks not only for a study but for suggestions on salary-analysis tools and a system for ongoing market review. A report alone does not give HR a way to see the market or maintain the structure between engagements.

What we do: The City keeps this live portal and the cost-to-close decision tool. HR can verify every source, model its own scenarios, and maintain currency without waiting for the next study.

The deliverable that outlives the engagement

The ongoing market-data maintenance system.

Alongside the study, the City receives a repeatable process and toolset for keeping pay current: a documented comparator list with the public sources to re-pull each cycle, a refresh cadence tied to the budget calendar, the cost-to-close model to price any policy move before it goes to the City Commission, and this portal as the living home for it all. The goal is simple: the City should be able to answer “where do we stand against the market?” in an afternoon, every year, without commissioning another full study.