United Grinding Technologies, a grinding machine firm located in Miamisburg, Ohio, had to deal with a number of these compensation issues. Christine Taylor, SPHR, the organization's Director of Corporate Human Resources, had to create a compensation plan to determine the pay rates for all 140 individuals employed with the company. However, there were problems-it was difficult to find appropriate benchmark jobs that enabled her to easily develop a pay structure. To make things work, she enlisted the help of line managers to create sound job descriptions, which were then used to match jobs with BLS and trade association pay survey data. Multiple jobs with similar skills were used as benchmarks, since there were no exact matches in the databases. This enabled Taylor to get an idea of what to pay individuals working in these jobs based on positions that were reasonably comparable to the jobs found in United Grinding Technologies.

1. How would you evaluate Taylor's approach for developing a pay structure at United Grinding Technologies? Would you have done anything differently?