Jay Highfill

Jay has more than 20 years of experience providing workforce consulting services in the higher education and healthcare sectors. He specializes in process improvement to increase levels of labor productivity, developing aligned performance management and compensation reward systems and implementing innovative and effective strategies for more efficient operations.

About Jay

Jay is a senior professional with two decades of experience working with diverse organizations to develop workforce strategies and policies that reflect and support a focused mission. He has specific expertise in labor productivity improvement, performance management, total rewards, human resources (HR) policy, benefits valuation, staff compensation, labor relations and counter-union defense.

Throughout his career, Jay has:

• Led the design and implementation of workforce improvement programs to develop a standardized approach to labor management and managed training programs focused on the education of front-line leaders toward tactical application of work standards. This resulted in customized labor management tools and methodologies that are applicable at the executive and departmental levels to monitor and maintain productivity goals.
• Served as the leader of a comprehensive total rewards study for a hospital in central Florida, where he managed the evaluation of reward delivery for effectiveness and analyzed the labor market, facilitated the design of a reward philosophy and provided mechanisms for implementing the overall reward strategy, including compensation, benefits and absence programs.
• Managed a human resource performance improvement project for an academic medical system in the Midwest, where he developed a new human resource organization structure to improve HR processes, advised human resource operations on compensation administration and developed a premium pay dashboard to assist management with cost control.
• Directed the compensation analysis project for a higher education research institution, where he developed a titling structure to improve matching jobs to labor market surveys and assisted with a survey library design and implementation.

Prior to joining Huron, Jay worked for various consulting firms in addition to being an economics professor at Missouri State University, where he specialized in labor economics, microeconomics and econometrics.

Jay has spoken at numerous conferences, including The Annual MSA National Survey of Healthcare Executive Compensation and The Annual MSA National Survey of Key Professional and Technical Jobs from 1995 through 2000. He has also spoken at the MSA National Survey of Healthcare CEO Compensation, Ohio Hospital Association Annual Meeting and Kansas State Society for Human Resource Management Annual Conference.

Jay holds a Master of Arts in economics from Wichita State University and has completed postgraduate work in mathematics and statistics at Missouri State University. He is also designated by WorldatWork as a certified compensation professional (CCP) and certified benefits professional (CBP).