There has been a lot of talk about candidates and employees going online to benchmark jobs. In most cases, this is done without the benefit of context, so they often walk away with misleading information. But what about HR professionals? Is it okay for them to use Indeed or LinkedIn job postings to get a quick read on what competitors are paying for a role? It’s fast, it’s free, and it seems like real-time market data.
Salaries from job postings can absolutely be part of your benchmarking toolkit. They should, however, be regarded as a sanity check, not a strategy in itself. Used exclusively, this can lead to decisions that look data-driven but are actually built on nothing.
Using publicly posted salary ranges for free compensation benchmarking has become increasingly common in light of Pay Transparency legislation. With an abundance of job postings now including salary information, it’s tempting to believe the market has become transparent. Job posting ranges provide only a partial picture of compensation, however. For a complete view, employers need to supplement job posting information with Ontario-specific survey data that reflects what organizations are actually paying across salary, wage, benefits, and compensation programs.
For HR professionals managing a full plate of priorities, the appeal is obvious. The information is available instantly, and it’s current. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that compensation is genuinely technical, multi-faceted, and constantly changing. So when a job posting hands you a dollar figure that looks like an answer, it’s a fragment of one at best.
What Posted Salaries and Ranges Actually Represent
For employers with more than 25 employees, the Ontario Pay Transparency rules requires that public job postings include either a specific salary or hourly rate or a salary range that reflects the expected compensation for the role. If a range is used, it cannot exceed $50,000 unless the role pays more than $200,000 annually.
A posted range reflects what an employer wants to advertise, with little indication of what the organization will ultimately pay that new hire. Different companies take different approaches to this. Some post extremely broad ranges to maximize their applicant pool, while others intentionally position ranges higher or lower for the purposes of strategic recruitment. It’s possible that two companies hiring for what appears to be the same role may publish dramatically different ranges based on their compensation philosophies, internal pay structures, geography, company size, or region.
For example, a posting that says “$85,000–$135,000” is technically compliant with the new rules, but tells you almost nothing about where a real offer will land. Is the employer targeting the low end for someone with minimal experience, or is $135,000 the realistic ceiling for a highly qualified candidate?
This is also where the distinction between the hiring range and the full range gets lost. Some organizations post their hiring range, that being, what they’d realistically pay a new hire, depending on experience. Others post the full range for the role, including what a long-tenured incumbent could eventually reach after years of merit increases. These are very different numbers, and a job posting doesn’t specify which one it is.
A Salary Posting Doesn’t Tell the Full Compensation Story
The ranges posted for open jobs are only part of the compensation story. Other benefits, such as incentive plans, shift premiums, overtime opportunities, pension contributions, RRSP matching, paid time off, and other forms of compensation, are often broadly framed or excluded entirely. When you’re reviewing postings, you won’t know if a position with a lower advertised salary may actually offer greater total compensation than one with a higher published salary range.
Two employers may post almost identical salary ranges for the same role, but one employer’s total rewards package could completely tip the scales. Of course pay is a big part of compensation, but a proper evaluation also needs to include factors like:
- Health and dental coverage, and the cost-sharing aspect of those benefits
- Pension plan contributions and RRSP matching
- Bonus, incentive, and/or shift premium structures
- Vacation time allowance beyond the statutory entitlements
- Flex-time and flexible arrangements
- Work-from-home policies
- Work-life effectiveness initiatives
Overlooking this aspect is a real mistake. A number or a range of numbers is only one piece of the pie. If you look at compensation through this lens, you’re missing a large part of what actually makes an offer competitive, and this also applies to your own offers as well. You can review current benefit trends in our recent blog The Benefits Benchmark: What Ontario Employers are Really Offering in 2026.
The Gap in Quality
Public postings provide isolated snapshots of individual organizations. They don’t provide measures of central tendency, sample sizes, industry cuts, regional comparisons, or trend information. Compensation surveys, by contrast, aggregate data from multiple employers and provide a broader view of market practices.
There’s also the question of whether you’re truly looking at the same job. A title alone doesn’t tell you enough, and few titles illustrate this better than HR Manager. At one organization, an HR Manager leads a team that includes an administrator, a generalist, and an HR business partner. At another, the same title means one person handling recruiting, labour relations, compensation, compliance, and everything in between — alone. The scope, the accountability, and frankly, the market value of those two roles are not the same, and a posted salary range won’t necessarily tell you which one you’re looking at.
The same problem shows up in how postings describe working conditions. “Hybrid work model” sounds like meaningful flexibility, but it could mean working from home three days a week or one Friday a month. Without that context, you’re not just comparing different salary ranges. In reality, you’re comparing different jobs, different environments, and different value propositions, all under the same title and the same vague language.
The salary range reflects the actual job being performed, not the title attached to it. Without knowing the full scope, comparing posted ranges across organizations can be just as misleading as comparing the ranges themselves.
Compensation survey data, like what COIRI gathers and provides through Clarity, exists precisely to address these blind spots. When employers report into the survey, they’re reporting actual pay practices tied to clearly defined job descriptions. This is not the same as what they may be advertising online to attract candidates. Accurate benchmarking is defined by matching the same role scope to the actual incumbent pay data, with context on how that pay fits into a broader total compensation picture.
Survey data also gives you access to important percentiles based on real pay data from real organizations. Instead of guessing where in a $50,000 range a posting is really aiming, you can see exactly where your organization sits relative to the market, and make an informed decision about where you want to be positioned.
What to Say When a Manager Pushes Back
For many HR professionals, a manager will at some point walk in with a job posting and ask why your organization isn’t matching it. The goal here shouldn’t be to shut down the conversation. It’s to make sure any pay decision that comes out of it is one you can stand behind.
That usually means taking the posting seriously rather than dismissing it, while making it clear that a single number on its own isn’t enough to act on. Before anything changes, it’s important to ensure that the role being compared has the same scope and that the comparison accounts for total compensation, not just base pay.
From there, the conversation naturally shifts toward your survey data. If there’s a real gap between what your organization pays and what the market is doing, that’s exactly the kind of thing survey data can confirm, and it gives you something solid to stand behind if the decision is questioned later. Framed this way, the posting becomes the starting point for a proper look at the data, rather than the final word on it.
What Public Job Postings Should be used for
Job postings have a value in the overall approach, but they’ll never be a substitute for proper benchmarking. They’re a snapshot of what employers are advertising, filtered through wide pay transparency ranges. They provide no guarantee of what they represent or what else is included in the offer.
Simply put, job postings are a useful data point, not a data source. Use them to stay aware of what’s happening in the market, but keep your benchmarking grounded in survey data that actually controls for role scope, total compensation, and organizational context. One posting proves nothing. A pattern across reliable data sources does.