Jessica Neeling, chief human resources officer at the Oregon Department of Administrative Services, demonstrated the state'equal-pay calculator during a Feb. 26 meeting of the Joint Committee on Ways and Means Subcommittee on General Government.

Neeling used a fictional candidate, "Jana Gardner," to show how the calculator combines required experience, degree-equivalents and job profile to produce a placement step and grade for hiring managers. She said the tool is intended both for HR staff applying standardized rules and for prospective employees who want to see where they would fall on the state's salary schedule.

"I promise they're not real," Neeling said as she introduced the sample resume. She described the calculator's instruction tab and walked committee members through the inputs the tool uses (job profile, experience dates and degree level) to calculate an employee's step.

Neeling told the committee the live demonstration failed to populate grade profiles because the file she used was not pulling from the agency website; she said the tool works properly when accessed directly from the DAS site and offered to email committee members a completed example after the hearing. "We normally, our analysts across the enterprise pull[ ] off of our website and they don't save it locally," she said.

On who can be included in the calculator, Neeling said it covers executive-branch positions only. In response to a question about legislative assistants, she said, "legislative assistants are not populated in our tool because it's only for the executive branch," and that hiring managers could run the tool to get a sense of placement but that HR could later disqualify experience that is not relevant to a particular classification.

Neeling described how the calculator applies deductions and additions (for required experience and degree equivalents) to determine a staff placement step. She emphasized that the calculator is available on DAS's public website for both hiring managers and prospective employees to review and said she would send a completed version to the committee after the meeting.

No formal action was taken during the presentation; the session was informational and the demonstration ended with Neeling agreeing to provide a completed file to committee staff.

Ending: Committee members thanked agency staff for the demonstration and accepted Neeling's offer to circulate the completed calculator example by email.