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:
While you can adjust your typical market pricing strategy to fit unique roles, sometimes you need a unique pricing strategy. Whether you’re building an individualized strategy or merging your existing strategy with some new parameters, there are three steps I recommend when pricing a specialized role: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.
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.
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!