Benefits and Compensation Budget—Due in Week Complete the following: Benefits 1.     What benefits will be offered during Year 1 to all employees? 2.     What benefits will be offered for Years 2 through 5 to all employees? 3.     Create

Benefits and Compensation Budget—Due in Week

Complete the following:

Benefits

1.     What benefits will be offered during Year 1 to all employees?

2.     What benefits will be offered for Years 2 through 5 to all employees?

3.     Create and explain an executive compensation package.

Compensation Budget

1.     Budget includes benefits and wages.

·        Develop a budget for Year 1 and a yearly projection for the total compensation plan for 5 years. 

2.     Discuss the cost of the total compensation plan yearly increases in cost to the business and employees.

Reflection

·         

o   Write two-three paragraphs about your take-a-ways from this assignment. 

o   Rubric: 

Week : Course Project – Benefits and Compensation Budget

Benefits and Compensation Budget

·        Develop a benefits and compensation budget.

·        Follow APA style and format, and ensure the assignment contains a title page and reference page.

·        See the Individual Course Project Overview page in the Introduction & Resources Module for more details and expectations.

Remember to submit your assignment for grading when finished.

Rubric

HRM598 Week  Course Project (1)

Total Points: 100

Pay Structures

Staffing and Pay Structures

Staffing Analysis

The Human Resources Generalist I role demands a strong understanding of the labor market, as it is at the heart of recruitment, onboarding, employee relations, benefits support, and policy administration. The job holder of this position should be conversant with the fundamentals of employment laws, employment hiring procedures, compensation policies, record-keeping policies, and communication expectations of managers and employees. Moreover, the labor market now prefers applicants with the ability to balance administrative accuracy and judgment with communication and flexibility. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025), human resources specialists usually require a bachelor’s degree in human resources, business, communications, or a similar area, and it states that the ability to communicate, make decisions, and be attentive to detail are the key attributes to succeed in the occupation. Thus, technical human resources knowledge, professionalism, discretion, data accuracy, and the capacity to perform various functions simultaneously are the knowledge and skills required in this job.

Hiring in this position should be fairly manageable, but keeping good workers might be more challenging when the company is not able to pay them competitively and show them visible career advancement. The human resources talent labor market is dynamic. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025), human resources specialists will see an increase in employment of 6% between 2024 and 2034 and approximately 81,800 vacancies annually, indicating the constant need for qualified candidates. Simultaneously, applicants are very sensitive to compensation when considering opportunities. Newman et al. (2026) discovered that compensation and workplace flexibility are some of the most significant attributes that organizations can indicate to attract talent. An employer can hire entry-level employees with little trouble, but it will find it hard to maintain quality employees when rival companies are providing more definite advancement, better flexibility, or better compensation.

The ideal employee pool for this focal job would be early career professionals who have a bachelor’s degree and 0 to 2 years of experience in a related field, such as internships, human resources assistant work, or administrative support in people operations. Such an employee base ought to exhibit good communication skills, familiarity with confidential information, and the capacity to acquire learning compensation, benefits, and employee relations procedures. Since the job is not highly specialized but broad, the employer can recruit individuals who have attended business, communications, or human resources courses and then train them through a well-planned onboarding and mentoring process. The role should not, however, be considered as a clerical one in the organization. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025), human resources generalists are involved in recruitment, compensation, benefits, training, employee relations, and policy administration, which implies that the organization requires applicants with professional potential instead of transactional skills only. Thus, the staffing plan will be focused on flexible, promotable employees who can advance to the next level of generalist or supervisor positions.

The issue of staffing and pay structure is closely related since the kind of candidates that an organization is able to attract is largely dependent on how the organization prices the position, as well as how it communicates progression. In cases where employers require wide-ranging ability, sound judgment, and retention in a position, they should develop a pay system that indicates fairness and development. Compensation systems must be consistent with market data, organizational strategy, and pay grades and ranges must be used to reflect training, experience, and time on the job (Gerhart et al., 2023). Similarly, pay systems and transparent pay practices affect turnover intentions and employee attitudes towards fairness (Berber & Gašic, 2024). As a result, compensation design cannot be separated from staffing decisions. To achieve a better applicant pool and reduced turnover, an employer needs to match pay to external market conditions and internal career mobility.

Pay Structure Design

Recent market information indicates that the Human Resources Generalist I position should be in an entry professional pay grade. According to Salary.com (2026), the average salary of a Human Resources Generalist I in the United States is 58,923 as of April 1, 2026, with a 25th percentile of $52,055, a 75th percentile of $64,517, and a 10 th -90 th percentile range of $45,802 Moreover, Salary.com demonstrates a rational development of the Human Resources Generalist II at $73,178 and Senior Human Resources Generalist at $89,721, which confirms the notion that this entry position must be placed in a lower professional grade with an opportunity to grow instead of being a flat rate job (Salary.com, 2026). According to that market trend, I would place Human Resources Generalist I in Grade 6 in a professional support and specialist structure, with Grade 5 taking advanced assistants and Grade 7 taking Human Resources Generalist II.

Pay bands on reference rates give the benchmark on which salaries are administered. The reference rate or midpoint is the target remuneration of a fully competent employee who is doing the job successfully. The pay band will then set a floor and a ceiling around that midpoint to enable the managers to identify differences in experience, development, and sustained performance without necessarily limiting the labor costs and internal consistency. Grades cluster jobs that are significantly equal in terms of pay, and each grade has a range that has a midpoint, minimum, and maximum. The range provides flexibility to the managers, whereas the midpoint maintains the pay in relation to the market, and the grade maintains internal alignment (Gerhart et al., 2023). In this case, I would take the market average of 58,923 as the midpoint and a spread of 20% below and above it. That produces a minimum of $47,138, a midpoint of $58,923, and a maximum of $70,708. This scale is market-appropriate since the minimum is near the bottom of the market rates, and the maximum is near the 90th percentile, allowing the organization to compensate long-term contributions without reclassifying the job too soon.

Reflection

This assignment reinforced my conception of staffing and compensation decisions being a single system and not two different human resources processes. Prior to this analysis, it was simple to consider recruitment as a hiring problem and pay structure as a budgeting problem. Nevertheless, this exercise demonstrated that organizations can do a better job in staffing when they clarify the job, research the external market, and construct salary scales that are responsive to both the realities of the labor market and internal career progressions. I also got to know that a midpoint is not just a number since it articulates the pay policy of the organization and defines how the employees understand fairness and opportunity.

Another lesson that I learned is the need to balance flexibility and control. A pay range provides the managers with flexibility to compensate for growth and experience, but also prevents the organization from making unequal pay decisions. Furthermore, I also got to know that market data is not sufficient. Employers need to relate market rates to job content, promotion, and retention strategy. That knowledge is important since a company can hire talented individuals with an attractive initial salary, but will keep them only when the system allows seeing and believing in future growth. All in all, this assignment put compensation planning in a more strategic, more practical, and more workforce quality-related perspective.

References

Berber, N., & Gašić, D. (2024). The mediating role of employee commitment in the relationship between compensation system and turnover intentions. Employee Relations: The International Journal, 46(4), 721–755. https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-05-2023-0270

Gerhart, B., Newman, J. M., & Milkovich, G. T. (2023). Compensation (14th ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Newman, S. A., Kinchak, P., & Gopalkrishnan, S. (2026). What job attributes are most important for job seekers? Hint: Compensation and benefits—what to do with this knowledge and how to signal to job seekers. Compensation & Benefits Review, 58(1), 22–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/08863687251351440

Salary.com. (2026). Human Resources Generalist I salary in the United States. https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/human-resources-generalist-i-salary

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025). Human resources specialists. Occupational Outlook Handbook. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/