When we talk about new jobs, usually there’s a baseline to go off of — maybe it’s a backfill or a duplicate of an existing role. But when the role is entirely new to your organization, the preparation for hiring is different. The situation becomes even more complex when the job is new to the entire market or is extremely niche and unique.
The job and skills markets are always evolving — positions like AI or machine learning engineers are extremely specialized, but AI and data science are among the fastest-growing job categories in 2025. An important question is emerging alongside these new skillsets: How should they be paid?
Your traditional market pricing strategy may feel like it’s impossible when you’re tasked with pricing a niche position because it can be extremely challenging to find reliable data or make your usual moves fit this specific market. While your usual pricing strategy might not be a perfect fit, there are certainly tweaks you can make to help mold your typical tactics to a unique, newly emerging role.
One important thing to keep in mind when adjusting your pricing strategy is that your usual strategy is never static anyway! Even for the most straightforward market pricing exercise, you need to go through the following motions to ensure you’re getting a clear picture of what the market is telling you:
Typical salary surveys lag the market by 12-18 months, so you’re already applying some sort of aging factor to bring the data up to date. When working with rapidly emerging or changing roles, consider what type of data sources you’re working with and when they publish. If you want data that’s a closer match to the current market conditions, you can leverage surveys with year-round publishing cycles, such as Culpepper, or quarterly cycles, like Aon’s Radford McLagan Compensation Database. Finding data sources with more frequent survey cycles and timely updates provides your organization with up-to-date compensation benchmarks to support confident pay decisions. If you are happy with your current data set, you just need to take a close look at your aging strategy so you’re confident in the accuracy of your salary data.
Emerging job titles (like "Prompt Engineer" or "GenAI Specialist") lack standardized definitions, leading to massively misaligned salary ranges. Your usual job matching process calls for time to match your internal job data to salary surveys’ data, but this matching process is even more important for unique roles that don’t have a lot of context. You can’t price a job if you don’t know exactly what that job entails, and a truly scarce skill warrants a higher floor.
Before you run with a salary range, you have to find balance between paying a scarcity premium and maintaining internal equity. When hot jobs are hot, the market jumps in response to the demand. However, building a successful, resilient compensation program requires you to “play the long game” by making moves that are strategic and fulfill your organization’s larger talent and business goals. When working with specialized, emerging roles, you have to strike the balance between enticing talent and alienating your current employees.
Is this skill globally distributed or localized to high-cost tech hubs? Just as you price any role, you can use the geographic location to set the highest justifiable pay ceiling.
1. Assess Internal Value and Impact
Jobs are worth one thing in the market, but they’re worth something entirely different to your team’s goals. To determine a role’s worth to your team, look inward to consider its desired impact. If you can calculate the direct revenue generation potential or cost savings this role is expected to deliver, then you can quickly justify an investment in the role. For instance, if your new AI engineer builds a feature that saves $5M, they are worth more than a role that is expected to impact $4M in business.
Even if you can’t predict a revenue-related outcome, you can map the role's required experience, managerial scope, and decision-making authority to an existing, well-benchmarked level. You might find that this role operates at the same impact level as an existing Senior Director in the same department, therefore, it should be anchored near that pay band.
2. Try Proxy Benchmarking
In a similar exercise to how you compared the role to your existing internal structure, you should identify external, proxy “job neighbors.” Take time to find established job titles that share 70%+ of the required skills, such as comparing an AI Engineer against a Senior Data Scientist and a Software Architect. Creating an estimated pay range that’s grounded in adjacent roles helps you find a benchmark where you can feel like one doesn’t currently exist.
If there aren’t great “neighbors” for your role, you can try taking the role apart to look at its pieces. Instead of looking at the whole of the position, you can "unravel" the role's requirements into separate skills and assign a monetary value to each component based on existing roles. Think Skill A + Skill B + Skill C = An Ideal Range for the Overall Role, and then add a 10-20% Novelty Uplift to the total sum to account for the risk and experimental nature of the new role.
3. Consider Sources with Immediate Feedback
Compensation professionals love their data, and sometimes the best data comes from unexpected places! You can supplement data from your traditional salary surveys with a real-time data source (like Compa’s offer data), information from similar job postings, or anecdotal data that you can gather through internal conversations.
“Competition for emerging skill sets can be fierce; understanding what companies are offering can be critical to creating a winning strategy to close and then keep in-demand talent.” —Ashley Case, Director of Insights at Compa.
Your talent acquisition team and hiring managers are on the front lines with candidates, so they’re a great (often untapped) resource for compensation data. Talking with recruiters throughout the hiring process can be a great way to find candidate feedback and allows you to quickly course-correct before candidates move further into the interview process. Candidates' salary expectations can serve as a mini-market survey, so you can look for patterns in where expectations cluster.
Remember: emerging roles are subject to rapid salary deflation as the market catches up and talent scales. Don't set a compensation strategy in stone - remain confident, but flexible in your choices. To remain nimble and up to date, commit to reviewing the compensation of emerging roles every 3-6 months, not the standard 12, until the market matures and stabilizes. It’s also important to remember that your pay practices are meant to serve your organization’s people and goals, not just match the market “perfectly.” Define the “perfect” offer strategy for your team’s unique roles and consider how your total rewards packages create the impact you're aiming to create. Paying correctly for unique jobs is more than the money or benefits, instead it’s about signaling your commitment to innovation. Embrace the complexity now to win the talent later!
Compensation is key to finding and keeping the right employees. Explore more resources about getting it right.
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