Talk to any HR professional in Ontario right now and ask where all their time is going. The answer will be pay-related.
Getting compensation right has always been a challenge. But the conversation was internal. You’d benchmark every couple of years, set your ranges, defend a few offers, sign off on the merit cycle, and move on.
That’s over.
As we all know, job postings must now include pay ranges. This allows candidates to compare your posted ranges to all the others available online now. And on top of that, your own employees see those same postings, and they do the math.
What changed
A handful of things that mostly happened at once.
The biggest one, of course, is the Working for Workers Four Act. Among other things, posting salaries or salary ranges no larger than $50,000 is now required. Sounds simple enough, but in practice, it can be a can of worms. Many employers got caught flat-footed because the ranges they’d been using internally can’t withstand publication on Indeed. Determining ranges is tricky. Too wide, and you look like you’re guessing. Too narrow and you’ve lost the ability to negotiate before the candidate has even clicked the link. The ranges that hold up are the ones built on current, employer-reported data from organizations of comparable size, industry, and region. Educated guesses and numbers pulled from a salary aggregator website simply will not do.
The second is the abundance of pay data floating around online. Glassdoor, Levels.fyi, Indeed Salary Insights, Reddit threads, and more. In many cases, important factors like region, industry, and level are skimmed over or ignored, yet your employees and candidates are taking these numbers in. This is the new baseline, and HR leaders need to be armed and ready for it. You must be able to counter with actual compensation data from actual employers in your sector, or the numbers pulled from the internet will become the default reference point, whether they’re accurate or not.
Third, the Ontario Pay Equity Act didn’t change, but the posture around it has. The Pay Equity Office is more visible, and the documentation requirements for current plans are higher than most employers remember.
And fourth, the analytics conversation has crept into the executive layer. CFOs and boards have grown accustomed to dashboards for everything else, and they expect the same for people costs. “Are we paying market?” used to be a simple yes-or-no answer. Now it requires methodology, and you need to have one. And methodology without reliable underlying data isn’t really methodology — it’s just an opinion.
The risk of not doing enough
Nothing new here. It’s pay compression, market drift, and employees quietly moving on. These aren’t dramatic, headline-making problems. More like slow leaks that build over time, lurking quietly in the background until someone resigns, a posting sparks internal questions, or a compensation review uncovers a gap that’s been growing for years. In most cases, they trace back to the same thing: the compensation data wasn’t quite where it needed to be when decisions were being made.
What strong practice actually looks like
You don’t need a comp team of six and a six-figure software stack to get this right. Many of the employers we work with are running with one or two people in HR. What they have in common when they do this well is a few habits.
They use employer-reported data. Not scaled national data, and not what a recruiter mentioned on a call. Data from other employers in roughly the same industry, size, and region, refreshed often enough to be meaningful.
They have a job architecture they can point to and explain. If two managers can’t agree on whether a role is a Level 3 or a Level 4, your levels aren’t really doing what they need to do. The fix isn’t complicated. You sit down with the job descriptions, define what each level genuinely requires, attach pay ranges that reflect those distinctions, and write it down in language clear enough that the next person making a hire doesn’t have to start from scratch.
They review their ranges at least once a year. Not every two or three years. Markets moved a lot between 2022 and 2024, and the market for skilled trades in particular continues to be an ongoing compensation challenge. Ranges set in early 2023 are probably wrong in at least one direction now.
They document the ‘why’ on every offer using market data, internal comparators, premiums for hard-to-fill positions, and any unusual qualities of the candidate that come into play. This can be done quickly and carries considerable value moving forward.
They run pay equity reviews regularly, not as a response to a complaint. Comparing pay across gender, role, tenure, and level regularly allows you to see drift early, well before it becomes an expensive fix.
They train their managers to talk about pay. This is the one many employers skip, and it matters a lot. Many pay conversations happen one-on-one between an employee and their manager. Every manager needs to be able to explain why an employee is making what they’re making, where they are within the range, and what their path forward looks like. (See our blog on Getting the Conversation Right for more information on this.)
A reasonable first step
Granted, it seems like a lot. If you want a jumping-off point, pick one role. Ideally, a role you’ve had trouble filling, or one you’ve felt some pressure on retention. Pull current compensation data on it, hold it up next to your existing range, and have an actual conversation with the people who’d need to approve a change.
The scrutiny isn’t going to ease up. Pay transparency rules are likely to expand over time. Employees are not going to stop talking about money. Providing a methodology is becoming a must. The HR teams that come out of this period in good shape will be the ones that, sometime in 2026, decided that good compensation data was worth treating as a high priority and a core infrastructure rather than a once-in-a-while project.
If you want to see where your ranges stand relative to what Ontario employers in your sector are paying right now, that’s exactly what COIRI’s Clarity platform is built for. It’s easy to get started. You can sign up for a free trial in less than a minute and see if our data is a good fit for your organization.