Since the reform and opening up for many years, China's private small and medium-sized enterprises have achieved rapid development. The rapid development of private small and medium-sized enterprises has made great contributions to China's economic growth and social employment. At the same time, the globalization of economy and the acceleration of knowledge innovation make high-quality human capital not only a strategic resource of the country and society, but also an important symbol of whether private small and medium-sized enterprises have core competitiveness. As an important part of the human resource incentive mechanism, the salary system is directly related to the efficiency of the use of human capital and the sustainable development of enterprises, so this paper focuses on the analysis of the problems existing in the salary management of private enterprises. The author's judgment is that it is a challenging task for private enterprises to win competitive advantage, attract more excellent and outstanding talents, encourage them, develop them and stay in the fierce and rapidly changing business environment.

In order to survive and develop, private enterprises must implement flexible strategic transformation and new management methods. As the source of lasting competitive advantage, talents play an increasingly important role in the development of private small and medium-sized enterprises. Therefore, under the new situation, how enterprises, especially private small and medium-sized enterprises, attract outstanding talents has become a matter of great concern to operators. As an important part of the incentive mechanism, the salary system is directly related to the vital interests of employees and the sustainable development of enterprises. Undoubtedly, how to attract, form and retain a high-quality and competitive workforce with salary today and achieve the best incentive effect is a problem that ambitious private small and medium-sized enterprises must seriously consider. Since the reform and opening up, private small and medium-sized enterprises have made great progress, but it does not mean that they have embarked on the track of harmonious development. According to the investigation on the current situation of human resources management in China enterprises (including more private enterprises in China) jointly conducted by Enterprise Research Institute of the State Council Development Research Center and China Human Resources Development Network, China enterprises are still in the transition period from traditional personnel management to modern human resources management, and the enterprises have not yet formed a reasonable one. The effective salary system suitable for its own development is only based on simple performance appraisal results, such as "bonus distribution" and "salary adjustment", and some of them still have the problem of copying the western salary system.