In today’s economic environment, having accurate and up-to-date compensation data is crucial for retaining top talent, attracting business-critical roles, and forecasting your company’s compensation-related investment. Compensation benchmarking datasets are designed to give HR leaders insight into trends most relevant to their industry, while keeping pay in line with a desired benchmark percentile.

Often, though, diving into benchmarking datasets can be complex and require countless hours of manual correlation to your company’s current compensation data. Not only that, much of the available market data is outdated from surveys published six months to a year prior. With Comp Management on the Sequoia People Platform, HR leaders have access to real-time market data and interactive insights that can help inform how to compensate employees fairly and competitively.

Here’s three common ways Comp Benchmarking on the Sequoia People Platform can help:

1. When Introducing a New Role or Job

When adding a new role or job to your organization, it’s vital to have reliable market data to guide your decisions about compensation. With Sequoia, you can quickly access market data for various compensation components (such as base salary, bonus, and equity) from an exclusive and anonymized dataset of Sequoia clients that updates with every pay change, equity grant, and leveling update. This information can help you create competitive offers for potential candidates and collaborate with finance to budget for organizational growth.

2. When Evaluating Compensation for Current Employees

The compensation benchmarking tool can also help you assess the compensation of current employees in your organization by filtering for specific employees and evaluating how their pay compares to the market based on parameters you’ve chosen. This can be useful when preparing for annual compensation cycles or addressing ad hoc requests, such as assessing the pay of an employee who may be at risk of leaving the organization. Current pay can even be correlated with recent turnover trends to see which teams are experiencing higher rates of attrition.

3. By Leveraging Market Data for Daily Activities

As an HR expert, you may frequently need to access market data to make informed decisions about employee compensation. The compensation benchmarking tool allows you to quickly access a complete yet anonymized dataset you need for relevant job families and levels, such as director-level M5 or professional-level P4. This information can be invaluable for making data-driven decisions in your daily activities.

Access to real-time benchmarking is a powerful resource that can help HR professionals make informed decisions about employee pay. With Sequoia’s Compensation Management system providing this market data, you can manage your organization’s total people investment –from pay ranges to candidate offers— with confidence.

As you look to inform your compensation practices, consider:

  1. How up-to-date and relevant is the market data you’re using to inform employee pay decisions?
  2. How do you determine where to focus comp changes to mitigate attrition?
  3. How competitive is your compensation across your organization’s job levels?

Want to learn more? See how Comp Management from Sequoia can help you stay on top of changing compensation trends at www.sequoia.com/platform/compensation-management/

Matthew Zimmerman — As the Director of Total Rewards Advisory at Sequoia, Matt is responsible for ensuring Sequoia clients have compensation programs that attract, motivate, and retain their employees. Matt specializes in designing cash and equity programs, benchmarking, multinational firms, and communication of rewards programs. Matt enjoys spending time with his family, rooting for New England sport teams, and playing golf and hockey.