E X P E R T Q /A
Compensation Best Practices with Grant Battle, Head of HR at Hired What’s the best way to leverage third party salary data? Third party salary data is a crucial ingredient to building out a scalable, competitive, and (if you are bold enough) transparent total rewards philosophy. I would strongly recommend all companies take advantage of one of the curated salary surveys that isn’t exclusively driven by unfiltered participant information. While saving money and using LinkedIn salary or Glassdoor might be tempting (particularly for SMB organizations), the reality is that this data is limited for a number of reasons, including: 01
Limited ability to segment data in manners relevant to your organization (i.e. company size, funding stage, industry or job function)
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Data is not curated and is entirely dependent on respondent integrity
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Limited sample sizes relative to salary surveys
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Lack of additional data for other aspects of the total rewards package like OTE (On-Target Earnings) and %TSO (total shares outstanding) Data that typically lags behind rapidly changing trends, particularly in high-demand/ low-supply positions like blockchain or machine learning (as highlighted in our own State of Salaries Report)
Two third party data options I’ve used with great success at Hired and at my previous organizations are Option Impact by Advanced HR and Aon Radford. Third party data is most effectively used when paired in consideration with an evaluation of internal norms. This is critical in helping guide your HR and leadership teams’ determination of how you invest in your team. For instance, if you have aspirations to pay a certain function, say engineering, at the 75th percentile of market (OTE) on average but look at your internal organization and see that you are closer to the 50th percentile, there is likely going to be a significant material investment required to rightsize the organization. 1