Watch: The Role of Talent Acquisition in Redefining Market Data

Compa CEO and founder Charlie Franklin recently sat down with Tauseef Rahman of Mercer to talk about pay transparency and talent acquisition. You can watch the entire conversation here, or, enjoy the short highlight video below.

Video Transcript:

‍Charlie Franklin, CEO, Compa:‍

We're talking about market data set in the context of this era of pay transparency. Talent acquisition teams are engaging with the market every day when they talk with candidates. And with all of the pay legislation affecting how job postings are made, what kinds of conversations you can have about pay with candidates with the offers that you ultimately make… in a sense, recruiters are on the front lines of pay transparency. 

So my question for you is how could we turn to talent acquisition as a source of fresh insights into the market?

‍Tauseef Rahman, Career Business Leader, Mercer:

‍TA teams have always been a source of information. In my mind, there are three things in terms of using TA inside data. One is, how do you calibrate it? 

Because there's info coming from TA and how does that stack up with market data versus past offer acceptances and internal comp data? How do you validate it? And what I mean by that is the ‘one-off.” 

For example: ‘Charlie didn't accept our offer, and he accepted somewhere else. And therefore, I have this one single data point that I'm going to over-index on.’ How do you mitigate that? Confirmation bias and exception bias come into play. 

And then the other piece is integrating. I think that's the key to using that information as another source of information to drive this. And I will say, I think one of the things with pay transparency is that it's going to be complex and it's going to be a little rough. Helping clients think through how to navigate it has certainly been keeping us busy. For folks who want to get a look at it is what are the pay ranges for various job postings that competitors are putting out there.

I can only see the role of TA (and I don't mean specifically recruiters), but for those who are understanding the go-to-market competitiveness of offer ranges, relative to the real offers versus the posted ranges for other companies, there's going to be even more info to integrate.

‍Charlie Franklin, CEO, Compa:

I agree. When I was in comp, I would get recruiters coming to me with their hair on fire saying “we have to make an exception and pay somebody, our guidelines are totally out of whack.” And it was really, I had a ton of empathy for the position they're in and often was tasked to solve whatever is going on (especially if it was a high profile hire). 

But it was really difficult because you're dealing with anecdotes, screenshots, and sort of paragraph text threads. And you're like forensically trying to piece together what's actually going on in the market. And it was just so hard to understand. I do see this opportunity… if we can find the right higher bandwidth collaboration between the talent acquisition and the compensation teams. TA is your interface with the market. When we talk about market data, it's sort of like this esoteric, abstract thing. 

Take the housing market, for example, if you're considering selling your house, it's one thing to read an article in The New York Times that says the housing market is doing this or that. It's another thing entirely what's happening in your city, in your neighborhood, for your house with your number of bedrooms. 

And so what I think about in the corollary in the talent world is exactly what you were saying: Who are our top talent, and competitors? What are they doing? Or when we talk to candidates, what do they want? And how does that compare to our pay strategy? 

Building that connective tissue between your market interface (which is talent acquisition), and the kinds of comp strategy decisions that you're trying to implement seems essential to be able to move faster when everything's changing. 

These teams have to build this bridge between each other in a more effective way.

Next Steps?

If you’re interested in taking your talent team to the next level, consider Compa.

Compa is for talent teams who want to stop losing people over pay. When recruiters capture candidate pay insights, Compa transforms them into your own real-time market data to help you create fair and competitive offers. Unlike traditional market data, it’s powered by your unique market interactions.

So at the end of the day, you get real-time, company-specific intelligence to help you win more offers, beat your competitors, and thrive in the Era of Pay Transparency.

If you’d like… click here to request a demo.

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