The interviewing process is imperfect.

Hiring managers and HR are on their best behavior. They are selling candidates on the job’s responsibilities, the people they will get to work with and for, the company culture, and the vision/mission of the executives.

Candidates are promoting themselves and aligning their interview question answers to what the employer wants to hear. They are anticipating how to best present their capabilities and experience.

Many years ago, I worked with a man who would randomly find a word in a dictionary, read the definition, and then use it in a sentence at least once a day.

His vocabulary was amazing. Because I sat next to him in cubicle land, I learned a lot of new words and their definitions too.

So, while I normally post about things related to compensation, HR, and leadership I thought I’d share a new phrase I learned this week. 

There are many decision points in an employee’s time working for an employer. 

The point in time when they are hired is obviously the first. And, of course, getting an employee’s starting base pay right is essential to solving the pay equity gap.

Then their pay, performance, and potential will be reviewed annually. That means that employers have three times a year they can move toward equity.

Many of you are thinking about asking your manager for a pay raise. Here are the steps to use when planning that conversation.

1.      Research and know your worth. Go to ProsperConsultingLLC.com > Resources > Free Pay Data.  Also summarize pay data you are seeing on job postings.

2.      Write your SOAR stories. Situation – Obstacles – Actions – Results

If you don’t deliver a total rewards statement to your employees, you are missing out on communicating the full value of what they are receiving.

Our brains haven’t evolved to keep up with the amount of information we have available to consume.  And it is difficult to determine in the moment what is important and what is not. 

What you pay your employees and the benefits you provide are important for employees to understand.

The higher up in an organization you are the less you know about what is really going on. 

When your direct reports and their teams prepare an update for you, they make sure to portray progress on deliverables and hurdles to success in a way that is sanitized.

Sanitized means made more palatable by the removal of elements that are likely to be unacceptable or controversial. In other words, you aren’t getting the real story about what is going on.

When you purchase salary survey data, the data is a snapshot in time and has an effective date.

But you want to use the data to create salary ranges for the next year. So, that means you need to age the data to align it to the next year.

In other words, aging the survey results accounts for the time between when the data was collected and the date you want to apply the data.

For those of you who aren’t living the dream in “Compensation is My Life Land,” the compa-ratio calculation is an employee’s base salary as a percentage of the base salary range midpoint.

If the compa-ratio is 100% then the employee is paid the midpoint of the base salary range.

And range penetration (or position in range or PIR) is calculated by first subtracting the minimum of the pay band from the employee's salary, and then dividing those results by the difference between the maximum and minimum of the same pay band.

Most of the time, no.

Many employers provide bonuses to employees that aren’t motivating high performance. Instead, they are a surprise amount of money that isn’t explained. 

There are two categories of bonuses:

I am working with a couple employer clients right now on their promotion process.

Currently, they don’t have a standardized process. And what the managers provide to HR to justify the promotion is not a complete business case.

So, I created “A Disciplined Promotion Process:”

It is that time of year when managers are getting ready to review the performance of their employees.  Most managers must assign a performance rating to each employee, and no one wants to give or get the middle rating. 

It doesn’t matter whether you call it “meets expectations,” “solid performer,” “satisfactory,” or “achieves performance standards.”  Each of these is heard as, “You are average.”

And none of us believe we are average.

I spend much of my day typing.

Typing notes, agendas, compensation communications, emails, summaries of data, etc.

And the result is this.  A keyboard that has the letters worn off.

It is normal to want to limit risk. And yet we can’t fully prevent the potential to be laid off as an employee.

Focus your time and energy on what you can control.

First, ensure your skills and knowledge are up to date and that you are marketable. That means being viewed as qualified for the type of job you want to perform. Invest in yourself. Update your resume and optimize your LinkedIn profile.

We are seeing more and more job postings with salary ranges. 

About 30% to 40% of employers are not complying with new state pay transparency laws. But for employers who have had laws in place since 2021 like Colorado, the compliance rate is closer to 70%.

We are also starting to see more complaints filed and lawsuits if a company does not comply.  Some employers will pay penalties for noncompliance and others will lose in court.

I have said that more times than I can count.

Usually, I have said this about the job in a salary survey that is being chosen as a match for an employer’s job.

The person doing the “apples to oranges” comparison is:

·        Using the survey job title to determine the match instead of the job responsibilities.

I like working with people who get stuff done. Little things. Big things. And the in between things.

Some people are great at describing problems. But they don’t recommend potential solutions.

Others can go into detail about what happened to cause a problem.

We are quickly moving toward the end of the year. Your work-related performance will be evaluated and discussed by your manager, your manager’s peers, and your manager’s boss. 

While some employers have implemented continuous feedback processes, many others continue to use the performance evaluation approach that has been in place for decades.

Let’s shift to your personal life.

You are probably starting to think about and prepare for the holidays that occur during November and December.

When you are looking for a match in a salary survey, sometimes you cannot find one that is an exact match to the employer’s job description. 

Scenario #1: The employer’s job description has responsibilities that are “MORE than” the salary survey job’s description. 

·        Step 1: You look in the salary survey for a higher-level job to use as a match. That higher level job doesn’t exist in the survey or market data isn’t reported because the sample size was too small.

An employee’s journey with an employer starts when they apply for an open job. Ideally, the employer includes the base pay range, incentive information, and a benefits summary.

The interview process doesn’t give the employer a tremendous amount of verifiable data on which to make a new hire pay decision.

The candidate is selling themselves to the employer. The employer is selling themselves to the candidate.  Everyone is on their best behavior and realistically not everything that is shared is true.

I’m curious as to what approach you use when marketing pricing a hybrid job.

By hybrid I mean a job that is not able to be market priced with one job match from a salary survey. Instead, the hybrid job is a combination of 2 – 3 jobs.  For instance:

The hybrid job title is “Data & Chat Support Rep.”