Marston's case study: Pay Tracker Live is top of the menu for live pay data

Back in 1834, founder John Marston never imagined his brewing start-up would grow into a London Stock Exchange listing with over 14,000 employees. Today, Marston’s runs more than 1700 bars, pubs and hotels across the UK, and chooses HR DataHub to help attract and retain the very best hospitality talent.

Legacy of Dated Data

Pay trends are forever changing. In the past, while annual salary surveys gave Marston’s plenty of detailed market analysis, the data behind this benchmarking quickly outdated. Survey data could be up to 12 months old by the time it was in the hands of the Marston’s Rewards team, and often out of step with more recent shifts in salary rates driven by inflationary pressure or other market drivers. A short-term workaround, collecting salary offers manually from recruitment sites, proved time-hungry and admin-heavy. Finding easily accessible market-wide info on up-to-date pay rates across multiple roles became a nagging challenge. This had a huge impact on Marston’s capacity to offer attractive rewards in a fast-moving, highly competitive jobs landscape.

Live Data for Better Pay Decisions

“It’s all live, localised data and the platform has a lovely interface. The data is right in front of you within a minute!”*Vitek Sobr, Senior Reward Partner, Marston’s PLC

In 2020, Marston’s adopted HR DataHub’s real-time UK salary benchmarking platform. From day-one, the software provided 20:20 visibility of current job supply and demand, advertised job titles and pay rates, all in real-time and UK-wide. Today, used in tandem with annual and industry-specific surveys, HR DataHub provides the Rewards Team the most comprehensive and up-to-date pay-related insights, everything that Marston’s needs to make well-informed choices about pay and benefits for its thousands of staff.

Fast Pay-Back on Pay Data

*“To me, it offers more than enough ROI, purely from a my-time usage perspective.”

Before using HR DataHub, it could take over an hour for the Rewards Team to research pay levels for a single role. Seeking out data for multiple job types consumed days of painstaking online search. HR DataHub delivered ROI for Marston’s from the get-go, with on-point, real-time results returned instantly via an intuitive, user-friendly interface. Faster, more efficient info-gathering saves users hours of tedious search and data collation and frees up daily schedules to focus on higher-value strategic tasks. HR DataHub gives Marston’s full confidence that its pay-rates are fair, competitive and benchmarked positively against today’s market norms. Further payback is expected from its use as a validation tool to sense-check salary increases business-wide.

Right Rewards. Right People. Right Time

*“If you want a tool that’s quicker, cost-effective and easy for the business to understand, HR DataHub is a no-brainer.”

As well as powering smarter pay-decisions across Marston’s current recruitment and retention programmes, HR DataHub is key to the company’s future rewards strategy. Marston’s is planning a rollout of HR DataHub to more team members, for answering internal requests from managers to benchmark staff compensation and ensure the right rewards go to the right people at the right time.

‍