The worst time to decide what a role pays is after you have verbally offered it. By then the number is not a decision any more, it is a negotiation you are losing. Settling the band in advance takes an afternoon and removes most of the ways an offer falls apart at the last step.
1. Define the level, not the title
Titles are not comparable between companies. A senior engineer at a forty-person startup and a senior engineer at a bank are doing different jobs for different money, and benchmarking one against the other tells you very little.
Write down what the person actually owns instead. The scope they are responsible for, how much direction they need, and what stops working if they are not there. That description stays comparable across companies even when the titles do not.
2. Gather more than one number
Use at least three recent sources for that level in your region, and be honest with yourself about how old each one is. Compensation data ages badly, and a survey from two years ago is describing a different market than the one you are hiring in.
Then discard the outliers instead of averaging everything together. One inflated number from a company that overpaid to close a hire will drag your average up, and one from a company that systematically underpays will drag it down. The middle of what is left is usually closer to the truth than the mean of all of it.
3. Set the rules, not just the range
Decide the bottom, the midpoint and the top, then write down what someone has to demonstrate to land at each one. This is the step most teams skip, and skipping it gets expensive in a way that is hard to see at the time.
Without written criteria, the top of your band goes to whoever negotiates hardest rather than whoever is strongest. That is how you end up paying your most confident hire more than your best one. It is also how pay gaps open up inside a team, quietly, one offer at a time, until someone compares notes and you have a much larger problem than a salary band.
4. Get sign-off in writing before you post
Whoever controls the budget approves the band before the role goes live. Not verbally, in passing, on the way out of a meeting. In writing, with the actual number in it.
This one step prevents the worst outcome in hiring, which is an agreed offer unraveling at the final approval because someone senior is seeing the figure for the first time. You lose the candidate, you usually lose the runner-up who has accepted something else by then, and you lose the next few weeks restarting.
5. Publish it
Once the band is agreed, put it in the posting. It costs you nothing you were not already going to pay, and it is the largest single lever you have on both the volume and the quality of applicants. The rest of that argument is the first section of why your job posts are not converting.
A band you agreed in advance is also far easier to hold under pressure. When the conversation about money happens on the first call instead of the last one, there is nothing left to reopen.