Salary Surveys

Most salary surveys ask one question: how does our pay compare to municipalities of a similar size?

That's useful information, but it's an incomplete answer to a much bigger question, one that many municipalities aren't asking clearly enough:

At Ferrero Forward Consulting, we approach salary surveys differently. Our goal isn't simply to benchmark your pay scales against comparable organizations. It's to understand and help solve the real drivers of employee retention and attraction in your municipality.

The Real Cost Isn't Just Salary

The municipal labour market is genuinely competitive. While local governments often share knowledge and talent across the sector, every employee who leaves represents a real cost: lost institutional knowledge, disrupted service delivery, recruitment and training costs, and time before a replacement is fully up to speed. That cost is significant, and it's often invisible in a standard compensation report.

Compensation matters, and where a genuine pay gap exists, our review will show it clearly. But pay is only one part of why people stay, or why they leave.

Understanding Where Your People Are Actually Going

Rather than starting and ending with a comparator survey, we go deeper:

• Turnover analysis: how many employees has the municipality lost over recent years, in which departments and roles, and what does that pattern actually show?
• Exit interview analysis: what are departing employees actually saying, and what patterns emerge over time that a single exit interview would never reveal?
• Where people are going: which organizations are attracting your former employees, and what does that tell you about your real competition for talent?
• Direct outreach: with current, former and prospective employees, to understand firsthand what's keeping people, what's pushing them out, and what's missing from the offer.
• Regional market movement: understanding talent flow across the region, not just static compensation figures at a single point in time.

Understanding What "Attractive" Really Means

Attracting qualified candidates isn't only about matching or beating another municipality's salary line. Career growth, workplace culture, flexibility, leadership, recognition and a clear sense of purpose all factor into whether a strong candidate chooses your organization or someone else's.

Our review identifies what your municipality may be missing beyond compensation, so you know exactly where to invest to become a genuinely attractive employer, not just a competitively paying one.

Using AI to See the Full Picture

We use AI to analyze trends across turnover data, exit interview themes and interview responses, surfacing patterns that would be difficult to see manually, especially across multiple years and departments. This allows us to combine hard compensation data with a genuine understanding of why people stay, leave or choose not to apply in the first place.

The result is a single report with one clear goal: helping your municipality remain competitive, with cost always in mind, but never treating cost as the only lever available to you.

A Real Example: Turning Around a 60% Leadership Loss

When Guillermo was hired as CAO of the City of White Rock, the organization had lost 60% of its leadership team to other municipalities. Council's direction was simple and urgent: fix it.

Using this same approach, which went beyond a standard comparator survey to genuinely understand why leaders were leaving and where they were going, the City redesigned its compensation policy and repositioned itself competitively in the market.

The results spoke for themselves. Following the review and the new policy, the City didn't lose another leader. More than that, White Rock became genuinely competitive for talent, successfully attracting and hiring senior leaders it would never have been able to recruit under the previous approach.

That's the outcome we aim for with every salary review: not just a report, but a real, measurable turnaround in retention and attraction.

Our Process

• Benchmark compensation against relevant comparator municipalities
• Analyze historical turnover data by department, role and tenure
• Review exit interview data for patterns and root causes
• Conduct outreach and interviews with current, former and prospective employees
• Identify where former employees are going, and why
• Use AI-assisted analysis to surface trends across all of the above
• Deliver a clear, practical report, where the pay gap exists and where it doesn't, and what non-compensation factors are affecting retention and attraction
• Provide practical, prioritized recommendations focused on keeping and attracting the people your municipality needs

Why Ferrero Forward?

A salary survey that only compares numbers tells you where you stand. It doesn't tell you why people are leaving, or why the right candidates aren't applying. We go beyond the comparator report to help you understand, and address, the real reasons behind retention and attraction, so your municipality isn't just competitive on paper, but genuinely competitive for the people who will move it forward.