Live Salary Data That Replaces Your Stale Annual Surveys

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LaborIQ (ThinkWhy): Real-Time Compensation Data for Mid-Market HR Teams Tired of Stale Surveys

The Challenge

Compensation planning at mid-sized companies often feels like navigating with an outdated map. Traditional salary surveys arrive annually, reflect data that's already six to twelve months old by publication, and require HR teams to extrapolate what the market looks like today. For companies with 100 to 1,000 employees competing against larger enterprises for talent, this lag creates real problems: offers that miss the mark, internal equity questions that can't be answered with confidence, and hiring managers left to negotiate without current intelligence.

The stakes have only intensified. Pay transparency laws are expanding, candidates arrive at interviews armed with Glassdoor data and LinkedIn salary insights, and economic volatility means compensation benchmarks can shift meaningfully within a single quarter. Mid-market HR teams need access to the same quality of labor market intelligence that Fortune 500 companies have historically commanded, without the budget for custom consulting engagements or the staff to conduct ongoing market research.

How LaborIQ Approaches It

LaborIQ, built by Dallas-based ThinkWhy, takes a fundamentally different approach to compensation data. Rather than relying on periodic survey responses, the platform continuously aggregates and validates pay information from multiple sources, including 8.6 million pay stubs and what the company describes as 18 trillion data points. The result is salary benchmarking that reflects current market conditions rather than historical snapshots, covering more than 20,000 job titles across U.S. metropolitan areas.

The platform's core Salary Answers feature delivers localized compensation recommendations by job title, metro area, industry, and experience level. HR teams can pull up a software engineer salary in Austin, compare it against Denver or Dallas, and see how their current offers stack up against the market in real time. This eliminates the spreadsheet gymnastics that many compensation professionals perform when trying to make aging survey data relevant to today's hiring decisions.

Where LaborIQ distinguishes itself is in connecting compensation data to broader labor market economics. The platform includes workforce forecasting tools that project supply and demand trends three to six years out for more than 40,000 roles by metropolitan area. This context helps HR leaders understand not just what to pay today, but how competitive pressures might evolve. For a manufacturing company planning a facility expansion, or a healthcare system anticipating nursing shortages, this forward-looking view informs both compensation strategy and workforce planning.

The 2024 addition of Pay Band Manager extends the platform's utility beyond benchmarking individual roles. This tool helps HR teams create and maintain internal pay structures, ensuring that market data translates into consistent, defensible pay ranges across the organization. Combined with the Total Compensation feature introduced in 2021, which analyzes base salary alongside bonuses and incentives, LaborIQ addresses the full scope of competitive pay analysis.

Who It's Built For

LaborIQ serves mid-market companies best, particularly those with 100 to 1,000 employees who have outgrown ad hoc compensation decisions but haven't yet built dedicated compensation functions. The platform assumes some HR infrastructure exists, with users who understand job families and can match their roles to standardized titles, but doesn't require an economist on staff to interpret the data.

Companies at a growth inflection point tend to find the most immediate value. When an organization moves from hiring a few people per quarter to scaling aggressively, or when pay transparency requirements demand documentation behind salary decisions, LaborIQ provides the data backbone. Current users span industries including manufacturing (Celanese), logistics (XPO), healthcare technology (HIMSS), and benefits administration (Ameriflex), suggesting broad applicability across sectors with significant U.S. operations.

What Customers Are Saying

Users consistently highlight two themes: data accessibility and customer support quality. A talent acquisition manager at Ameriflex reports that LaborIQ's market data helps her "be really prepared with market research" during hiring conversations, and she recommends the platform "to anyone in talent acquisition" for setting proper salary expectations. The global talent acquisition leader at Celanese describes the Total Compensation tool as "a game changer" for creating easy-to-read charts that compare offers across base salary and variable pay.

The support experience draws particular praise. One reviewer notes that "the customer service and follow up has been exceptional," with the LaborIQ team quickly answering questions and proactively following up to ensure adoption. Another describes the software as "very user-friendly, appealing to the eye, and easy to navigate." Users do note some limitations, including gaps in coverage for specialized job titles and constraints on seat licensing, but these concerns are typically framed as areas for improvement rather than fundamental flaws.

Getting Started

LaborIQ operates on an annual subscription model without published pricing, though third-party sources suggest premium tiers around $7,977 per month. The company explicitly states there are no setup or onboarding fees, and every new customer receives a dedicated Client Success Manager to guide implementation. Given the absence of complex integrations required, deployment is straightforward, focused primarily on familiarizing users with the platform rather than technical configuration.

Prospective buyers should verify coverage for their specific roles and locations during evaluation, particularly for niche technical positions or emerging job categories. The platform currently lacks deep HRIS or ATS integrations, so organizations seeking automated data flows will need to plan for manual processes or export workflows.

Key Takeaway

For mid-market HR teams seeking compensation intelligence that reflects today's market rather than last year's survey, LaborIQ offers a practical path forward. Its combination of real-time salary data, labor market forecasting, and accessible interface addresses the core challenge of making informed pay decisions without a dedicated compensation analyst on staff.

Learn more at laboriq.co