Marion County, FL Accelerates Compensation Strategy with TrueComp Benchmarking

Customer Case Study: Marion County, Florida

As one of the fastest-growing counties in Florida, Marion County needed better tools to ensure its compensation strategy could keep pace with regional demand and internal hiring needs. Historically, the Human Resources (HR) team had relied on time-consuming public records requests and emails to gather market data—an inefficient process that often-delayed decision-making and yielded inconsistent results.

“It was the old public records request, calling and emailing other counties, requesting job descriptions that may or may not match. It was very time consuming,” said Sara Caron, Director of Human Resources for Marion County.

That changed when county leadership discovered TrueComp at a NACo conference and quickly saw the value in purpose-built benchmarking tools designed specifically for government agencies.

From Manual Workarounds to On-Demand Insights

Before adopting TrueComp, Caron and her team faced a familiar public sector challenge: how to get reliable, comparable compensation data quickly enough to support decisions about hard-to-fill roles. The lack of standardized job descriptions and the time-intensive nature of peer outreach meant the team often had to make assumptions or operate without complete information.

“What stood out about TrueComp is that it’s built for government entities only,” said Caron. “This provides a truly apples-to-apples look at where we stand with other, similar agencies.”

With TrueComp’s Benchmarking platform, the HR team can now access current salary, benefit, and job description data in seconds, instead of days or weeks.

“I love that we can see other job descriptions with a click of a button and quickly scan to select the most relevant match,” Caron added.

Supporting Key Roles and Budget Decisions

TrueComp’s Benchmarking platform has already delivered measurable benefits to Marion County’s workforce planning and decision-making process—particularly for hard-to-fill roles like engineers and planners.

“We’ve been able to identify where we’re lacking and determine whether we need to adjust salary or fringe to stay competitive,” said Caron.

Managers and department heads now have more visibility into how HR arrives at recommendations, helping build internal alignment and eliminate misconceptions. “The biggest benefit is efficiency, access to transparent information, and a better understanding from our managers as to how we get the data and use it,” Caron said.

A Better Way to Communicate Compensation Strategy

Beyond internal discussions, the HR team has started using TrueComp to support justifications for salary changes, budget increases, and workforce strategy discussions. While they haven’t yet used the tool in union negotiations, Caron believes the clarity and visual reporting tools will be helpful in future conversations.

The results speak for themselves. “GET IT,” Caron said when asked what she’d tell other public sector teams still relying on spreadsheets. “Our ‘lunch and learn’ was very productive and started a lot of good conversations with other local entities. We all need to share this information.”

Planning Ahead with Confidence

Looking forward, Marion County sees Benchmarking as a core component of its workforce strategy.

With accurate, up-to-date compensation and benefit data at their fingertips, the HR team is better positioned to show the value of the county’s offerings—and make the case for needed changes.

“TrueComp will help us ensure we’re offering competitive wages and benefits,” said Caron. “As one of the fastest-growing counties in Florida, we need to stay ahead of the curve as much as possible.”