Name: 7.30 How to prevent offer and pay alignment issues that create hiring delays
Uploaded: 2026-07-30T18:00:07.868Z
Duration: 2 h
Description: 7.30 How to prevent offer and pay alignment issues that create hiring delays

Transcript for "7.30 How to prevent offer and pay alignment issues that create hiring delays": Hello, everyone. How are we all doing today? My name is Amit. I'm really excited to join Simone for our new workshop together on how do we build alignment between comp and TA and HR and reduce hiring delays. We're gonna give everyone a couple of minutes to join, get started. But while you're doing that, write in on the chat, tell us where you're joining us from. Previous webinars, we've had people as far away as South Africa and Chicago and all sorts of different cities around the world. I'm kinda curious to see who the furthest person away is. I'm joining you from, well, overcast New York City. Simone, where in the world are you today? I am in Los Angeles, California today. It's quite, sunny. my my favorite city. It's mine too. I am so jealous. It's always beautiful. We've got people from sorry? Go ahead. Oh, no. I said it's been extra nice recently. It's been extra nice. We have people from Metro Detroit, Canada, and Norway, so I'm excited. I'm excited. Keep it coming. And while we do that, let's introduce ourselves. I'm a huge job description and talent acquisition nerd. I think the problem that I've been obsessed with for the last ten years is how do we get these different HR teams in our organization, comp, TA, people ops, you know, HR VPs. How do we get them to all work together in alignment? Human resources is getting even more complicated than it's ever been, and that's what drives me. Simone, tell us a little bit about you. Yes. Hello. I am Simone. I'm a principal people business partner here at Payscale. And, like, all of those things keep me up at night as well. I think I have a really special vantage point to be able to figure out how we can better make all of our internal people teams work together and as a result to keep our current employees happy and bring in the best talent in a really seamless and helpful way. No. No. I'm gonna pick up on the smash burger enthusiast. Like, given you live in Los Angeles, I am shocked it's not In N Out. I'm shocked. My favorite. It's still my favorite. It's still my favorite, but I do think that we have just such a great list of options when it comes to smash burgers. But I do fear the the craze is winding down a bit, which is bad news for me. Yeah. What's your go to order? I when I go to In. N Out, number three, chopped chilies, add addition, grilled onions, and a lemon up every time. Alright, audience. I'm gonna have to ask you because I'm a big, big foodie. So while while we go to everything else, help me out here. What's your favorite burger? What's your favorite burger order? Let me know. I'm just fascinated. I just go for, like, my standard number one, and it's just the thing that I do. But In N Out is my favorite. And we don't have one in New York City. Just White Castle for you. What do you gotta do? But let's get into today's conversation. Today, I really wanna talk about with you know, we've got we've got Simone as a phenomenal practitioner. I wanna talk about the complexities that happen between TA and comp, especially as it relates to hiring. Now the great part is it's not just the two of us here, but all of you are experts too. So I'd like to hear from you as we go through the conversation, the things that you're struggling with, the things that you figured out. I think every one of you has figured out something about HR and hiring and compensation that is valuable to everybody else. So let's keep this really interactive and let's share because that's what we're all here for. Let's just set the stage a little bit with what we're sort of dealing with. But before that, we have a quick poll for you. We wanna hear from you right away. And so the poll I wanna have for you today is when you think about pay related friction in your hiring process, what is the thing that keeps you up at night? Is it, a, hiring managers with unreasonable expectations? Is it, b, candidates with unreasonable expectations? Is it, c, rigid internal bands, leveling bureaucracy internally, outdated data? Or are you in that lucky few that don't have any pay related friction in the hiring process whatsoever? Tell us through the poll. Give us some more details in the chat. Let's talk, Simone, while we wait for the poll to to get filled out. What what do you struggle with the most? Where do we feel in your career as you've looked not only here, but in in your previous experiences, where what's created the most friction for you? I think it's often been not having a comp philosophy that the entire organization has bought in on and holds pretty sacred and make sure to really abide by every single time we're making an offer, every single time we're taking a roll out to market. And with any little flexibility, it can easily break. And once that happens, it's hard to get back on track. So I think that that's what I I end up running into the most. You make such a good point about the comm philosophy, Simone, because oftentimes, I think a and b, the unreasonable expectations from hiring managers and candidates are symptoms of a disjointed comm philosophy. When a hiring manager comes in and they're like, I wanna level this very differently or, like, I have these or I want a candidate and, like, I just wanna pay them nothing and you're just that just part of it is means that do we have at a comp philosophy, do you have to have you built a job architecture? Have we aligned to the market? And I think, especially with larger companies, one thing that happens is the job architecture and the comp philosophy gets stale over time. The market's always moving, and we've been through so much. We've been through pandemic and return to office and remote. Everything the market's always moving and our comp philosophy isn't moving with it. It's sort of relying on stale data. How do you communicate that with your hiring manager when we're dealing with that? That, like, this is not this is not a you problem or a Us problem. It's it's it's a systematic problem here. Yes. It's really important to communicate that the market is alive. It is constantly moving. It's not stagnant. And also communicate what that means in terms of the time that we need to really thoughtfully move through an offer. And I think you can't be overly communicative when it comes to that because then hiring managers understand, compensation understands, TA understands, and you end up working as a really well oiled machine when you're constantly in communication about those changes. That's right. Now I noticed a few people said b so far. So if you did, can you write in and tell us what's changing? Why are like, we we we're in a world where candidates have, you know, we we're in a world where people are talking about job hugging and, you know, how difficult the labor market is on the candidate perspective. And yet a number of you have written in and said the candidates have unreasonable expectations. I believe you. I believe that candidates do, but what's driving that? How does it manifest in the hiring process? Simone, love to hear from you a little bit. Like, what happened? Like, how do you, the last time you saw a candidate just have a, like, unreasonable expectation, like, where do you think that came from, or how did it manifest? I think a lot of that has actually grown from the increase in sharing ranges in job descriptions as we continue to see comp laws change. We see a lot of organizations requiring job descriptions. And while we know they should be good faith based ranges, they aren't always. And I think that a lot of candidates see that and see really wide ranges across the board. And as a result, it makes it a bit more difficult to have those conversations upfront about expectations. I think that's exactly right. I think that's really and this is where I think employers are doing a bit of a disservice cause I think the ranges tend to be sometimes way too wide because we wanna cover if you don't have a job architecture, you're sort of doing a range that's, you know, 100 to $300,000. And so you're anchoring people on ranges that are bizarre. And I would argue, like, when one of the most impactful fixes you can have is have a defined comp philosophy and have a way to bring this back into like, when you're communicating with the candidate, too many companies are not really articulating how did we how did we build this job? What are we looking for? What are the benchmarks we've used? Why are these benchmarks current? Because the candidate's first reaction is, oh, you're using data from, like, two years ago or you're using data and, like, you know, you need to we need to be proactive in the way we talk about this. I'm just looking through the chat. And apart from the fact that a lot of people said Shake Shack, that kind of disappointed me. I will I will move past that. I think the paid transparency is the thing that's driving a lot of people crazy. And people are asking for the top of the range and sometimes it's just being unreasonable. I there's another factor that's still that, you know, a couple of folks have talked about that is under that we've we've almost forgotten about, which is the pandemic broke something in our hiring processes and our comp processes. Right? Like, we went from having very tightly location bound organizations to having these very distributed organizations. And then suddenly, the labor markets don't make sense anymore. Do you end up paying for how do you define your pay markets becomes really important. How do you define your role in contract to the pay markets? And how do you communicate that really effectively, which I still see we struggle with across across the market organizations struggle with. Do you see this as a sign of maturity, Simone, of, like, how sophisticated your pay markets and your pay structures are within your organization? Is that, like, the next level that we need to get? Definitely. Definitely. And I think that it has to be aligned with a long term vision for an organization. We've seen a lot of changes in remote and distributed workforces, and we've seen a lot of organizations go back to an in office culture. And what happened to your comp philosophy when you made these shifts, and have they been updated? And are you still revisiting them regularly, or did you treat it as a one time solution and a one time experiment? And as a result, your your ranges are out of date. I think the organizations that are really revisiting them and making sure they're aligned with the markets are ahead of the curve. That's exactly right. I think that's it's really about sort of even when you're coming back to the to the in office culture, if you've done an RTO, so many companies are still doing hybrid. And there's so many companies that are much more distributed than they used to be. And so we can't. just go back to, like, the ways we used to be. We need more sophistication. Let's talk a little bit. I wanna I wanna talk about how this problem is manifesting. And so we're gonna go forward a little bit and talk about what is the cost of a stalled offer? Where does it show up? So it's kind of fascinating. We do our annual CBPR, the compensation best practices report, and the whole report is worth to read. I you know, we'll post the link of the report here in the chat, but it's fantastic. But a few things popped up. The first is, but half the companies were very actively hiring and half aren't. And I'm not surprised because when we're in, weird labor market where not everyone is gung ho about hiring and especially because we're pulling across the market. The second thing I think resonates with all of you. We're seeing some of the lowest voluntary attrition rates that we've ever seen. The Wall Street Journal calls it job hugging, which is a very evocative term. But the thing that I'm finding struggling with is when I talk to TA professionals, they are still struggling to fill roles. In fact, even though we're 8% is the voluntary turnover rate, we're 60% of the orgs we pulled saw time to hire actually go up. Now part of it, you might say, is we're trying to be more thoughtful about hiring or raising the bar, but it's not that. For our for the roles that are in most demand, marketing, sales, manufacturing, what have you, sometimes it feels like it's impossible to find the right candidate or you find that it's impossible to get them get them to sign the offer in time. It's just nuts. And one part of it is the truth is in the last couple of years, HR organizations have gotten weirdly hit in which we're sort of doing, you know, 50% more work with, you know and 25% more work with 50% fewer people. And it is hard. Amy asked this question, do we think that this has to do with return to office? I do think it's to do with return to office. I think there's that's a part of it. But we've been seeing the RTO trend since 2022. And even after RTO has stabilized, we're still seeing time to hire go up. And despite AI revolution and all of that so I think there's something more fundamental. And I think the more fundamental thing that's happening, if if I'm being honest is, is there's a big shift in what we perceive as skills in this environment. And a lot of companies haven't really updated both their job architectures, and they haven't really updated or refreshed their comp philosophy. And so what we're starting to see is the companies that have are being really have a huge advantage and are starting to see their a small group of companies are seeing a big improvement in all of their core HR metrics, while the vast market is starting to struggle and lose talent and become really, you know, finding it harder and harder to work with. Simone, your thoughts? I definitely agree. I think that we're also seeing skills turn into requirements in real time. Things that were once a nice to have are now becoming a need to have in a role. As a result, we're going back and we're revisiting those ranges, and we're saying we're maybe putting a premium on this particular skill. Now everyone has that skill. So how does that change our ranges? So a lot of that is just changing so rapidly that it's making it hard to to keep up. I think that's exactly right. And I think the flip side is true too. You know, the hiring manager who used to send us that ridiculous job description that had, like, an MBA and 50 you know, like, you know, 500 little things, that hiring manager, you know, either the candidates just discount 90% of those elements. They do one click applies, and you end up stuck anyway. Or it just makes it even harder to slot that job into a comm philosophy, price it accurately. You end up pricing it sometimes too low for those types of roles or, like, you just don't know where to fit them. So it's just creating this confusion. Nothing. I completely agree. And I think that the best thing any organization can do to really start to focus in on your career ladders, focus in on what your job architecture looks like across your org. Because once you have a consistent philosophy, it really cuts this time in half. Yeah. I'm seeing a lot of orgs now. They're doing two really interesting things. One of the things we're seeing from an architecture standpoint is a lot of orgs are trying to figure out how do we consolidate levels. Because in the previous world, we kind of over granulated levels. You'd have a count in one, two, three, four. And it creates these really fractured environments, and it puts us in a bind. It puts us in a bind in a hiring world, puts us in a bind in a pay range world where, like, our ranges are really tight, but, you know, skills are a little bit more fluid, and we don't know how to we don't know how to make trade offs. We don't know how to say, oh, you've got an MBA. How does that trade off with years of experience? You've got phenomenal AI experience in this area. How does that trade off with maybe programming skills experience? The second problem that's happening so as you're flattening, and the second thing I'm seeing really thoughtful organizations do is they're starting to sort of specifically codify AI skills in their job architecture, and they're specifically codifying whether we how how much we expect AI to disrupt this in the future. And today, that might be just things that you kinda put in. You make estimates. You might say this is a 25% AI disrupted, you know, job family or 50% profile. The idea is that we can then, in a year, we can kind of relook at this and say, are we putting are we hiring the right types of skills? Are we putting the right types of people in the right places? Are we investing in the right types of things? If you're spending a lot of and it also allows a chart to then be more strategic in to their bosses, to the business to say, look, we're spending way too much time and resources hiring Okay. what are effectively non strategic roles for us as an organization. So I wanna talk about a couple more ideas. The first is so we did this study, and we said, on average, we looked at a whole range of different companies and job posts over a long duration. And one in three requisitions did not result in a hire, just got closed out without a hire. And the crazy part is that those those third actually took more work and more effort to than successful hiring. It just what basically happens at every org is a third of the roles, you spend an enormous amount of time hiring, and then you just give up. And then you say, you know what? We're just gonna hire a agency. We're gonna shut down the rack. We're gonna do an internal backfill. Like, whatever. We just we can't do this anymore. Everyone's frustrated. They're tired of doing interviews. They're just they're just tired. So, Mohan, does that resonate with you? Is that something you've seen? Absolutely. And because of that job hugging that you're referencing earlier, when someone leaves an organization, it creates a bit of panic. Every someone starts to feel really frantic because immediately, you spring into action trying to bring someone new into the org because, like you said, we have fewer people doing more work and we immediately need to fill that role. And so, when we speed up that process, it actually ends up slowing us down in the end. I would say consistency really is faster than than flexibility in this situation. Now I agree with you. Consistency is the key. And I think we've we've we're talking a little bit about how in a job hugging environment, time to flow was increasing, and I think this is why. This stat this stat has held through for the test at times. We've been looking at this number for five years ago, and we look at this number today, and it's remarkably consistent. In an average company, a third of roles just fail. May fail for a range of reasons. The business requirements changed. The candidates didn't, like, you know, we couldn't find we we're hiring in the wrong market. Range of reasons. The problem is when your recruiting team is half the size it used to be, this failure rate becomes a really expensive problem. Suddenly, you're sucking up less capacity into a really problematic sort of set of hires. So how do you fix that? What we've saw was about half of these no hires were becoming was a result of comp, comp imbalances, comp inefficiencies. And that's the worst type because you get really far with hiring. Imagine you kind of spent sixty days. You all your managers have interviewed this person. Maybe you've done an on-site. Person's come all the way, and now you're like, we're not even in the ballpark of each other. And either you do a terrible compromise, you pay way more than you should, or the role just dies. Both are bad options. And so the question what we've started to systematically see is when companies are able to fix that part of the problem, the alignment problem, this goes away. Like, half of these go away, and then you're you've got a situation where it's not putting the kind of stress on your organization. And that's our goal today with all of you, is if we could figure out what no hire rate is at our companies and fix it in half. Let's get let's take the comp piece out of the picture. This is gonna get a lot easier for you. You're gonna get a lot more breathing room. Actually, let me show you some stats of what has happened. Like, where does this add up? It adds up both in retention and it adds up in hiring. So the other issue that's happening is even though retention has lowered like, attrition is lower than ever, retention is starting to become a million dollar problem because the people when they do leave are really valuable, really expensive. And when they leave, they're really hard to fill. And our hiring recruiting teams are a lot smaller, so backfilling is really hard. So we've got a we've got a situation where the on average, companies with really great comp philosophies are retaining 6% more than companies with four comp practices. So your average retention rate across the board is about 85%. Great companies are doing closer to 91%. The problem is that that Delta is for each role is tens of thousands of dollars. And for, you know, for a decent sized company, if you're a few thousand employees, suddenly that's a million dollar problem. It's a million dollars your organization is spending on comp related issues. The second sort of so I wanna kind of come back into this question with all of you, and I wanna poll all of you again. When you're hiring, imagine you're hiring a backfill. Somebody quit. Lots of stress. You're out hiring. Where does that hiring process break down? Where does that one in three happen for you? Is it in not getting enough quality candidates? Is it interviews taking too long, scheduling just painful hiring managers are driving us bananas? Is it c, the offer compensation approval, which is we end up stumbling into the offer process, or is it for just getting the hiring managers on the same page? And I have seen that a lot in my life, so I'm gonna bias towards d. But I'd like to hear from you. And if you've got time, write into the chat and tell us what you see. Simone, your gut feel. Where do you feel like? A, b, c, or d? I think it's c. I think it's c. It's a mixture of c and d, and. I think that that's good news because that's very easy to solve once everyone gets aligned. But I do think it's a combination of c and d. Yeah. I think in today's day and age with all the tools available, interview scheduling should not be an issue. I'm curious when people talk about pipeline quality. Though, it's it's it's fascinating to me because we're in a market where the search engines have gotten better. You don't have to, like, you know, you can you can get great candidates wherever you want. So if if the pipeline quality is poor, one of the things that I recommend, and we're gonna share some webinars about it as well, is thinking through your job posts. Your job posts are like the hidden vector. A single great job post versus a bad job post can be a two x difference in number of qualified candidates making it to interview. It can be a three week difference in time to fill. And what do I mean by job post there? So is it optimized for Indeed? Is it optimized for LinkedIn? Is it gonna show up in the right searches? So unqualified candidates don't one click apply. And you're right. Is it the hiring manager expectations are related? I think a lot of you said it's not quantity. We're all getting inundated with one trick applies right now. It's horrible. And the question is it's on average. So we used to be that companies used to get about 10% qualified candidates for every 100 applicants. So you had 100 applicants come in, 10 people would move to the phone screen to the interview stage. What happened is, on average today, you're getting about 250, 300 applicants for for, higher, especially if it's remote, sometimes more. You're only getting four or five people who are qualified. Even with the AI tools, we just can't find enough qualified people. That is the problem. And our question is, how do you show up with the right searches? How do you build the right pipelines? How do you kind of even when you're sourcing, how do you source and get thoughtful applicants to read your job? If you're writing a 4,000 word job description, you're not gonna get the thoughtful applicant. Who's reading that? And that's where we gotta work towards. Simone, you've done an incredible amount of work internally revamping our job descriptions, making them really attractive. How did that impact the way we pulled the right candidates in and and improve signal to noise? It's really been invaluable because we've been able to very quickly and our TA team is incredible. They're able to very quickly scan resumes that come in and immediately see alignment between the key things that we need in a role. And we've worked with our hiring managers to be really thoughtful and diligent about that as well to say, what are the nonnegotiables? Let's put those in the job description. Let's lead with those. We can have conversations about softer skills and other requirements during the course of our conversation throughout the interview process. But most immediately, what is a nonnegotiable? Where do we need to immediately seek alignment? Put that in the job description. And as a result, we've been getting really great applications in, and our TA team is able to very quickly see who are really qualified candidates to bring in for interviews. Some of the comments are really fascinating. You know, how to price a role that was required to be fluent in four languages. Let's just one of the things we actually built into our JobNet recruiter tool for hiring is it limits sometimes you can actually be very specific about, like, length of a job and, like, limits how much a hiring manager is allowed to ask for because you just you can't you can't let them fill whatever pages they wanna fill. It's just insane. And it shows you sort of how other companies are writing similar jobs. We can go back and be like, yeah. Nobody else is asking for this much. Why are we how are we gonna compete? We we have to operate in a market. Another comment that I thought was really interesting was, was just like hiring you know, our like, how are we how are we aligning with the hiring managers? And I think one mistake that we make in our strategy and intake meetings is not showing up with the market comparables. We have to show up with four or five similar jobs in the market that a hiring manager can look at and then make trade offs in. Otherwise, if the meeting is always and and and and and and, then we're not really making trade offs. So we're not really and it makes it hard because comp can't and and and and and and. At some point, the price of the comp is the price of the comp. But, like, then you're gonna have to deal with different levels. Like, we have to be thoughtful. Now one of the incredible tools that we rolled out recently was skills based pricing as part of Ascent. And I just I'm I'm just nerding out on it every day, where you don't just get to pick a job. But with peer enhanced, you can actually pick and see the cost of each skill. And so the hiring manager is saying I want four languages, and I want an MBA, and I want, like, you know, all of these different things. It starts to show you that, you know, what happens to your budget, and can we afford this? And do we want to pay this? Like and really makes you thoughtful about, like, how do we think about each skill. So if you haven't looked at that one, check it out. It's just it's incredible. Let's keep going and let's talk a little bit about, about the cost of a stalled offer. What drives me crazy when there's a stalled offer is how expensive it is, how baffling it is. So, you know, we talked about lost productivity of $500 a day on average, and that's an average. But we're talking about, you know, almost 30%. Because what happens is when we if especially if a really critical hire that's stalled, it forces us to go use outside recruiting or outside help, and those get so expensive really fast. And what's really surprising to me is candidates is in a time where we think employers have more power, candidates keep complaining about poor hiring experience. They keep complaining about how terrible this is. And there's two common complaints about hiring experience. One is the lack of clear transparency about skills, about, compensation. And two, there's a lack of transparency about location. We'll say hybrid, but we won't say what hybrid means. We'll say remote, but we'll say you have to show up in an office. Like, we still haven't gotten good at that vocabulary, and those things create a terrible candidate experience. Simone, when you think about a offer that's stalled, how do you rationalize the costs? Like, what do we struggle? What are what is the biggest cost in your in for us, when we're, like when when an offer stalled or when a when a hire is stalled? Yeah. I think that the biggest one is time always and also to start to think about trade offs. Like you said, when we're looking at these skills and we're looking at the cost of a skill and what that's going to mean for the organization, if we didn't seek alignment at the beginning, we're then asking hiring managers to make decisions about what that means for the rest of their org. So maybe they currently have five open recs they need to fill, and they've really set their sights on this one unicorn candidate. And as a result, we're not going to be able to make five hires. Hires. We can make one. That's a difficult trade off conversation no one wants to have. So that cost of time and then also the potential cost, to the rest of the organization or the rest of that team in terms of productivity and alignment, how quickly they're able to move because they're getting those other candidates in versus not getting them in, is is a lot to to weigh, especially at the end of that process. The one thing that I also struggle with is fatigue. So in offers, one of the metrics increasingly companies are tracking is quality of hire. And, like, a simple way of tracking it is how many of the hires we made, you know, were still at the company six months later or were performing at the rate we want them to perform. What happens when you have a lot of stalled offers is there's so much fatigue. Your hiring managers have invested all this time interviewing candidates, and they just, like the organization just says, okay. Let's just hire the next person who walks in our door. And the quality of hire drops tremendously, and then six months later, you have a retention problem, you have a backfill problem, you have another productivity problem. That is just a massive drain on your org. And especially, you'll notice that in places like sales or in engineering, manufacturing, where you just it's very visible. Not having an engine not having somebody on the shop floor is very visible. Not having an AE ramp and be productive is very visible in an org. Definitely. So we're gonna talk about common ways breakdowns happens between TA and compensation. So we talked a lot about, like, comp philosophy and architecture, but let's break it down into four pieces. The first is classic outdated job architecture. If your job descriptions haven't been touched in two years, this is, you know, this is the number one issue we've gotta deal with. If and you another good example of this is if recruiting is out hiring and we're just like, oh, recruiting uses different job descriptions than comp, and that's a problem. Like, we're doing these things for expediency, but that ultimately hurts our comp philosophy. It hurts the sophistication we can operate with. The second, I think many of you mentioned this on the chat. Simone, you mentioned inconsistent leveling. We're we're leveling across it, and then this also creates a lot of resentment at the org. Right? Like, why is the why is that department get to level senior and I don't get to level senior? And it creates internal pay equity issues. It creates internal like, all sorts of issues. The third is comp guardrails. If every offer is kind of going to scratch event, suddenly comp professionals feel like they're on call all the time. Like, there's no framework. There's no rubric. There's no, you know, there's no setups, pay markets. There's just all of that creates a lot of stress. And then finally, it's the unclear ownership. I really struggle with that. It's like, do we know, like, when a job is done? Like, I what I hate is you've gone through all the approvals, you're in hiring, and then suddenly we wanna reopen something. Oh, the head of the department wants to rethink this job description. No. We we're here. The more like, right now, like, we have a pretty good job architecture. We've reworked that really well. We were in we have really consistent leveling. We have comp, guard rails. So in your previous companies, which of these four is, like, the hardest? Is, like, the hardest or the most urgent that we need to get we need to get solved? I honestly think it's unclear ownership. And the reality of the situation is that it ends up being a case of treating every single offer as a new opportunity, and it's as if we're seeing it for the first time. And that flexibility, it just it creates a slowdown that we can't reclaim time when we're when we're operating in that ambiguity. And so making sure everyone knows exactly what is required when we're opening a new rec, because it can be innocent enough as a hiring manager having someone leave on their team and assuming, of course, I have a backfill and just reaching out directly to TA, and we don't loop in comp, and we don't loop in finance. We don't know that we actually have approval, or it can end up being the end of the conversation feeling as though maybe I'll make one last attempt to see if we can break our comp philosophy and do something different. But either way, we're we're just losing time. Yeah. That's exactly right. It's just it's just that it that is so frustrating. Now Phil makes a really interesting point about he's he he's drilling the into the senior issue and inconsistent leveling, and it also relates to surveys. Right? When you're dealing with Mercer, when you're dealing with a lot of surveys, often you're you're matching off of titles. The one thing we've developed, which is, I think, been kind of game changer is our AI based smart pricing. And what it does is so you're working in job nav, you're working in your job descriptions, your job architecture, the summaries feed into pricing. And rather than just price off of titles, you price off of the actual Sydney, years of experience, skills in the job description. You're matching on that. So you can auto match to the right level on the survey and auto match to the right point. We just have to take that burden away from comps because, otherwise, we're constantly trying to struggle to match these roles and leveling, and it's a pain. And it really should be leveled based on the actual meat of the role. And if it's leveled incorrectly, maybe the job description isn't written correctly. It just gives us a chance to go back and feed that. So now I wanna kinda drill into two aspects. So the first is, you know, when does TA create the problem? Sometimes TA creates a problem where they kinda get out ahead of it with comp. They're pre selling the role to a candidate. Levels are shifting. Simone, you've seen this. How do when does TA really become the bottleneck here, and how can they do a better job as partners in your in your org? I think that this happens a lot when Tia is working directly with the hiring manager prior to syncing with compensation and making sure there's alignment there. And I understand the why. Right? It's because we're. moving so quick. We need to get someone into that role. But keeping comp out of this process or not making sure that you are using the most up to date job description, making sure that you're not in alignment working from the same job library, it just really can slow us down. And so I think that TA can only benefit from strengthening their relationship with compensation because when they're in alignment and when they're in agreement on what we will and will not do in terms of our comp philosophy, there's a really strong united front with the hiring manager that I think all hiring managers understand. And when they understand the why behind the decision, they're more eager to get on board. But if we're unable to communicate that, I think that that's where we run into a gap. So just continuing to grow that relationship between TA and compensation can only benefit the organization as a whole. I appreciate that point a lot because it's just this, like, weird I think when companies don't have any formal approval flows, they don't have any sort of, like and whether you have it very formally or not, like, you know, even these I see this in large companies. TA immediately goes to HRBP. HRBP immediately ruins sorry. Hiring manager goes to HRBP. HRBP loops in TA. And, like, we've cut out the steps. Let me go back to comp as an after afterthought. We go back to the business. We've gotta have like, the the opposite of that isn't having a ton of red tape, but the but it has to have every like, you know, it's almost like the Toyota manufacturing system. It's super precise. It always follows the exact same steps every time and that just following the same steps every time gives us the same consistent results. Like, we've gotta approach the same way with hiring and, like, you know, we've got we've gotta make sure the steps are quick, but we have to follow the same consistent steps. So we can't bypass and skip steps over here. Let's talk about the flip when comp becomes the problem, and comp is the one that's holding us back. Simone, where does that happen? How does it happen? What should we be vigilant about? I think that this happens a lot of the time when we are a bit too rigid, and that's why we have ranges. That's why we have and so that we can create some level of flexibility and fluidity within that process. And so we do have to honor that. And so if we set a comp band for a different role, we need to be able to move within it, and we also need to make sure that TA and the hiring manager know their parameters to move within that band. And when they know the guidelines, when they know what they can and cannot do and are able to operate with autonomy, I think that that just only strengthens the process. So we do need comp to be, a bit more flexible and collaborative when it gets to that point. And you also honor whatever we discuss upfront. If we say that this is the range for the role, that's range for the role, and we don't wanna go back and revisit that once we have really great candidates in the process, because we don't wanna sell that offer and potentially lose out on talent. That's exactly right. And t is your face at some level. Right? But they need to feel confident that they can rely on the rest of the org. That they when comp tells them this is the number, that that's a tested market calibrated number. And this is an evolution in our space. When I talk to our customers, you know, five, six years ago, like, the best in class would be, you're a large company. If you have a thousand job of you know, jobs and pay factors and market pay, you'd sort of price a third, a third, a third every year. Like, you'd reprice them, and you pay fresh because pricing was hard. Like, it took time. You had to match surveys and all that. There's no that's not the best practice anymore. Today, the market is moving so dramatically. Pay structures are moving. We've gotta constantly deal with that. The best practice is you have to you have to price every job at least once a year. And that's why there's always AI to help you do that and do it faster, do it better. And then not only do you price every job at least once a year because the data is changing so much. But, ideally, you need to have access to more real time data. You know, can you wait for an annual survey to get published? No. Like, we need data that's refreshing every month. We need data that's sort of rich and we can balance it out. That's sort of especially in areas of our firm that are very dynamic. And I think having that and then having the right pay markets, having the right structures, like, having that philosophy in place is what gives the rest of the org confidence because TA needs to go explain this to candidate. HRBPs need to go explain this to an employee. We need to people need to feel like they are operating with the right guardrails with the right data. So let's quickly touch upon the cost of all of this. So one of the things that is changing, we talked about data transparency earlier. It's it's becoming massive. It's a massive issue. And it's not going away. It's becoming global. It's coming to Europe. And so we really gotta think about in that environment getting that data to be right because it makes it it really exposes stale data. It really exposes unsophisticated processes when it comes to comp. So I wanna talk about a framework for creating faster and more consistent hiring. And we look to comp maturity as that. So when when we see companies getting better at this, before we even talk about the framework, how do we see where should we see these results? The first is we're seeing more companies getting more mature with their comp, which is exactly what we wanna see. We're starting to see them use comp as an executive lever, But we're seeing the companies that are moving towards more sophisticated comp practices, more real time data, or have 10% better offer rates, have better time to fill, have better retention by 6%, and it's driving massive business outcomes. Part of it is you've and this is where we can be helpful. We comp and HR have to make a business case to the of why these investments, why this time is worth it because it does drive such value to the business. And that's something we've gotta get better at. If you like sales, marketing, finance, they're all really good at making business cases. HR is not always the best at it. We're not great at saying that about articulating the value that we bring to the org. And I would argue in today's day and age, HR is often the biggest competitive differentiator between companies. Your ability to hire talent or attract talent is the basis on which your company is successful, and we gotta learn how to toot our own horn a little bit. And so I wanna talk to you about just one of those four foundations, a bit of a recap if you will. The first is, do you have a shared job architecture? Most important. Do you have a shared job architecture? Is it articulated? Is it visible? Is it not if it's in SharePoint, no. You don't. If it's a Microsoft Word document, sorry. That doesn't count. Like, is it something especially if you're an organization of size. It's fine if you're a small organization. But is it something that you can all look at in one way, shape, or form? Number two is do you have consistent leveling? And do those levels get enforced in the job architecture? It's one thing to have levels and then have job descriptions be all over the place. That doesn't count. We've gotta have it flow through. The third issue of bands and comp guardrails. And one of the most important things in comp guardrails is also pay markets. Do we have sophistication in terms of locations? Are we granular? Do we have real time data? Are we gonna make sure that we always use real time data or near real time data when dealing with this? And fourth is do we have fair ownership? Do we know that when when a job is in different stages exactly who owns it? What do I mean by that? I think what I wanna know is at every stage, if the team knows TA knows that they're in charge of sourcing and pipeline. Comp knows they're in charge of banding. Hiring managers know what they're in charge of. And they don't keep they don't keep sort of jumping in at the wrong times with the wrong SLAs, and they're showing up prepared. And I'm gonna ask for a show of hands here the poll again. How many company how many of you have hiring managers who drive you crazy? It's just they're just unprepared. They're not ready. They don't meet their SLAs. Simone, have you had hiring managers drive you crazy? I adore them all, but we have had moments where I wonder how we've gotten to where we are in the process. And I you know, it's like we can't blame it on user error. We can't blame it on the hiring managers. It's we are in charge of, like, as HR professionals, as comp professionals, as TA professionals, we have to give them the framework in which to operate and SLA in which to operate. Like, when you have a kickoff meeting for a role, you own that kickoff. We own the way in which we bring them in and give them the guardrails and have to be and it's hard because sometimes a hiring manager is a very senior person in our organization, a VP or c level person in our organization. And sometimes we've got to and they've got twenty years of experience, and they're telling us, I know engineering. I know sales. I know how to hire like, they're and there's sort of, like, just an an inherent power inequity. And this is where I encourage us as a chart of practitioners. No. We are the experts in comp, in HR, in talent acquisition. We live in this market day in and day out. We have to show up and own and lead the room and be prepared and have market data in everything and and bring people into the process that we want them to follow. And that's the only way to bring this out. So I'm gonna now we've got a few minutes before I wanna leave some time for q and a. But before we jump into q and a, I wanna leave you with a handful of very tangible tips that you could do before we jump into takeaways. So let's get into that. So tip number one. Having an accessible searchable job repository. Even if this is even if this is Microsoft Word or SharePoint, breaks my heart, but that's fine. But do we need to have a shared repository of approved job descriptions that everyone can look at and everyone can reference. What we shouldn't be having is people reinventing the wheel. What we shouldn't be happening is people going off and rewriting a job that you've already got an approved version of. Like, it has to be available. It's also really important for your employees. Your employees deserve to know what's the next level in the role. What how do I go how do I go from this role to that role? It's important for every single function at your org. Now we recommend having a proper job management system, and we have many, including our most recent offering, JobNap. But it should be searchable. It should be searchable. It should own and have all of your filters. It should be connected to your HRIS. It has to have it it needs to be here. That's number one. And when we implemented this, Simone, how much of, like, unlock was this? Like, where what what was this? It's so simple, but how did, like, how does it change behaviors? It was a complete game changer. We're not going into SharePoint, as you said, and searching for job descriptions and maybe wondering if we're operating from a copy and the originals living elsewhere with different qualifications listed. It just makes sure that we're all reading from the same sheet music. And as a result, we're able to just bring such incredible talent into the door in a really seamless way. It's everything. If you've ever uttered the phrase, let me check my email for to find the latest copy of that job description, then then then it's time to think about having a job repository. Tip two, codify your job architecture and examine your job architecture. What do I mean by that? First of all, do we know how many profiles are in each job family? Do we know how many employees are tied to each job profile? Do we have a governance system so that every job profile at the same level has the same core experience or competencies from a consistency standpoint regardless of their finance or marketing or whatnot. Having that, that's the basis of philosophy because it drives everything. It drives your comp, it drives TA, it drives everything. Having this codified and I'd say if you're if you're looking for a stretch goal, if you're an overachiever, have you looked at your job architecture with AI in mind? Those are the things that I'd love to see in driving this improvement and driving this this this and the next level. The third question is ensure calibrated skills. There's a few ways to do this. Many of you are using ChatGPT. My my biggest problem is hiring managers using ChatGPT or Copilot. I love ChatGPT or Copilot. But hiring managers can create such junk with that, and such, like, you know, skills that you can't price to you know, skills you can't recruit for. So I'm gonna ask you this is when we'll have every job, is it calibrated? Before we've made this an approved role, before we start hiring for it, have we looked at how other companies in that local market are higher? Have we looked at that labor market in itself thoroughly? We make this really easy. We have this really handy tool that's called similar jobs. It looks at the skills and qualifications of the job you're writing and shows you other jobs in a 40 mile radius. And it becomes really handy for us to say, do we need certain skills? Are we missing certain skills? Is this properly calibrated? We also have an AI feature that lets you rewrite that job with calibration in mind. But regardless of how you get there, you should be able to check off on your job. Yep. This has been checked against the local market. This has been calibrated, and this is really important. And then the question four, the tip number four, is pay transparency compliance. Some companies are getting fined $2,000,000 for just a handful of non compliant job descriptions. And compliance isn't just having salary ranges. In some states, it's having benefits, having, you know, paid leave. So are your jobs market standard? Are the ranges too wide or too narrow? Are there are they appropriate? Do we present the ranges in the right way? Like, if all of your competitors are presenting ranges as on target earnings and representing only base, that's a problem. We've got to rethink that and really drive that. Is paid transparency compliance been a headache for you, Simone? Absolutely. It can be. We are when we especially when you're an organization who's really doing things the right way and working to do things the right way in in a market where there may be organizations who are doing things a bit differently, it can create some friction. But making sure that we are constantly up to date and on of the tools we built that Simone's been using is a real time compliance. report. So it looks at every job you post anywhere on your careers page, pulls it in, checks it against local laws so you don't have to manually check because you do not have the time to be manually checking each of these jobs. And tells you exactly which ones need fixing so you can fix them right away. You get ahead of it. It even works in your ATS or HRIS to help you fix it before it goes live. So you never have any compliance issues ever. And so it's just a really critical however you automate it, whether using one of our tools or whether you build it in the ATS, Look for automation in these areas because this is becoming unwieldy for all of us to be able to use. So I wanna now leave you with just our list of takeaways. So let's talk through this together. So takeaway one. One in three jobs results in no hire. Oh my god. The worst. Let's cut that in half. Number two, it's not a speed problem. Someone talked about how TA can be the problem, comp could be the problem. It's an alignment problem. So I really want you to think about that, and that was one of the biggest things we heard from you as well. Third, job architecture and leveling of the foundation. Four, pay transparency is super critical. It means every offer conversation is just it's and I think you saw this too. It's just making the it makes candidates seem unreasonable and they're not it just makes it really hard for us to operate. And finally, having an SLA, having a shared framework, having a, you know, clear responsibilities can have a huge impact on your organization. So I wanna now we've got a few minutes left. Questions, thoughts from the audience? Fire away at us. I'll quickly pull up. I see some questions. A few people ask if this presentation will be available for download. It will. Phil asked a great question. How how is JobNav different from JDM? JobNab is like our next evolution, Phil. Thank you for asking. It's really a it's a platform that's AI native that's built for where JDM is a phenomenal tool that's built primarily for comp professionals working in pay factors. JobNav is a tool that sort of goes beyond and helps comp, TA, and HRBPs all work together seamlessly, work natively in the ATS, work natively in the HRIS, and work natively with AI. So it's a really exciting offering. We'd love to show it to you if that's interesting to you. Jane asked a question. If you have an established budget for the role and find your unicorn, when is it appropriate to go back to comp? And I'm gonna leave that to you, Simone. Simone, how do we handle that? That's such a great question because sometimes you do just find that perfect candidate, and I think that that's the opportunity to really build your business case and explain what this is going to mean for the organization. You do also have to be open to having the conversation about trade offs. Maybe that does mean that you are delaying a hire that you planned on making that quarter. You're moving that to the second half of the year. Being open to that and taking both your business case and that open conversation back to compensation. Usually, it it leads to a pretty favorable outcome, and sometimes it just really is important to get that person in the drawer for the sake of the business. It's exactly right. And that's if you get that unicorn, you gotta hire that unicorn. It's all I can say. Just do it. Make it happen. And hopefully, the rest of your organizational practices have been codified so the org can move really quickly. That's one of the advantages of having a really good comp philosophy or framework, all of that. It just it allows us to move quickly when we have to move quickly. Heather asked question, is JobNab a job description repository as well? Absolutely, Heather. That's exactly what it is. It's a it's a place to manage all of your job descriptions in one place, build them, but also manage your job descriptions as well as your job posts and connect them, sort of manage everything really thoughtfully there. So love to show you that, as well. Navin, I'm just looking around. We have I think we've answered almost every question. Just gonna come back to the chat. Oh, I'm just gonna say thank you all. This has been a wonderful audience. I love how you shared and really taught us a few things along the way. This is a topic where we will keep learning. We're all students of this incredible field. So thank you so much for all of your help, Simone. Thank you. You have been you. so much fun to partner with and so full of. wisdom. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you. Thank you all. Have a wonderful rest of your day, everybody. Thanks for coming.