What Is Benchmarking?
Classification and compensation work requires two types of context: how a role compares to other roles inside your organization, and how it compares to similar roles at peer agencies. Without both, it's hard to set pay, identify compression issues, or defend your decisions to leadership.
Holly surfaces both through two dedicated tabs on every class specification: Internals and Market. Each serves a distinct purpose, and together they give you a complete picture of where a classification stands.
The Internals Tab
The Internals tab shows all classifications in your organization that score above 60% similarity to the spec you're viewing. Holly calculates these matches automatically.
What You'll Use It For
Series analysis and salary progression. For specs that belong to a job series, Holly calculates the salary difference between consecutive grade levels — for example, how much higher the Administrative Services Manager II minimum is compared to the Manager I. This helps you assess whether your pay steps are proportional and defensible.
Identifying similar specs in your jurisdiction. Specs that have at least a 60% similarity score will be highlighted here for comparison.
The Market Tab
The Market tab compares your specification against similar roles at external comparator organizations — the peer agencies your organization benchmarks against.
What You'll See
At the top of the tab, Holly displays an aggregate salary summary across all included comparators: minimum, midpoint, and maximum. This gives you an at-a-glance read on where your classification sits relative to the market.
Below that summary is your comparison basket — a table of all the external specs Holly has matched to the one you're viewing.
Working with Your Comparison Basket
Each row in the comparison basket is a comparator spec from an external agency. You can:
Toggle comparators on or off to include or exclude them from the salary summary at the top
Expand a comparator by clicking the dropdown caret to view the full specification, pay schedule, similarity analysis, and links to relevant salary schedules and MOUs
Add notes to document your observations for your team
Search for additional specs to add to your basket using Holly's enhanced search
Filter by jurisdiction to focus on a specific peer group or comparator agency
Refresh selectively by choosing which comparator groups to re-run analysis on, rather than refreshing everything at once
Your filter and toggle selections persist when you navigate away and return, so you don't have to re-apply them each time.
Tip: Your comparators are organized into prioritized groups (with custom labels set up for your organization). Specs are shown group by group, in priority order, and any sorting you apply only reorders specs within each group — so higher-priority specs always stay on top.
Match Quality
Comparators are grouped into quality tiers based on their similarity score: Excellent (90% and above), Strong (80–89%), and Good (70-79%). If you would like to use a comparator that falls outside of this similarity score range, you can add it manually. For instructions on how to do this, see Adding and Managing Comparators.
For guidance on how Holly identifies and scores external matches, see Understanding Similarity Analysis. For step-by-step instructions on refining your basket, see Adding and Managing Comparators. For a guided walkthrough of running a full salary survey and exporting salary data, see Conduct a Salary Survey in Holly.