If you are an experienced HR professional, you know that compensation benchmarking (also called salary benchmarking) is the process of a company matching their compensation offering to similar roles from competing companies. For example, you might collect data on how much a competitor pays their sales managers with five years' experience. Then, you ensure your company is competitive in its compensation structure.

The practice of benchmarking ensures that you are never out of touch with your company's compensation offering and that your company can attract top talent. Also, when you accurately benchmark, you can better plan for annual employee increases. Talk to the interviewer about your benchmarking experience and the tools that you use in this process.