> HR should not be setting compensation. That's a business question and something the business people need to understand and deal with.
I read "out in the market calibrating salaries" as gathering market information which serve as an input for management in making compensation decisions.
Exactly what I was trying to get across. It's HR's job to come up with general salary trends by seniority, geography and anything else that management wants.
It's management's (really the CEO's) job to apply it. Is it a company that want to pay median salaries with lots of benefits? Low base relative to the industry, but lots of bonus and equity? Lots of cash? All these are the CEO's decision, but they shouldn't be the ones gathering the data.
This is really not HR's job. HR people are hired for experience with benefits management and bookkeeping; when they try to trend salaries, they inevitably wind up just sourcing extremely dubious data from extremely dubious sites. Most companies would be better off not pretending that HR has any other function than trying to minimize the cost of health insurance to the company.
Perhaps I'm biased because I've been in a few places where HR did the mainline jobs in the firm prior to becoming HR. Those scenarios turned out extremely well, though perhaps we didn't get the best deals in health insurance.
I've also seen (unhealthy) environments where HR's primary job was to protect the company from lawsuits. That's not great either.
In general I've counseled people not to put their career in HR's hands, but that's still a long way from calling it a near-useless function. It frequently turns out that way, but it has the potential to be much more.
I read "out in the market calibrating salaries" as gathering market information which serve as an input for management in making compensation decisions.