I work in HR. We had to mangle our salary analytics stuff because it kept suggesting that clients should pay more to attract talent. Like most employees in the same sector and position were being paid more that what they wanted to pay and that meant our analytics were wrong.

A (very) large but low paying company that struggled to hire around here also came down to that

Managers hired a consulting firm to get a report about why they couldn't hire : The report confirmed they couldn't get application because they overpaid engineers and their job ads were too generous.

Sometimes, you just have to use any broken maths to give the only thing that managers want to hear.