When establishing the wage of a career, employers might consider which of the following

A. Write job descriptions for all your positions, then,

B. Evaluate/rank the positions by level of responsibility and

C. Place them into a compensation structure, clustering positions with relatively equal weight into one classification or tier of positions.

Next you would research legitimate salary surveys to learn what other employees of similar revenue, industry, size, for/non-profit status (and other factors deemed important) pay for similar positions. Then you build your salary structure around this “market” rate.

The structure around the market rate should be what an experienced, solid performing employee is paid. Entry-level employees may be paid 75-80% of the market rate (depending on a variety of factors) and highly-experienced employees would max out around 120-125% of the market rate. And everyone else should spread out across that range based on experience, knowledge, performance and perhaps what they’d been earning in previous positions and what they negotiated coming into the organization.