How Compa helped recruiters at a public biotech company get out of spreadsheets and make smarter offers

A publicly-traded commercial-stage immunology company focused on combining immunologic insights with cutting-edge technologies to treat and prevent serious infectious diseases.

Infectious diseases are one of the leading causes of death worldwide and the cause of hundreds of billions of dollars of economic burden each year.

Its approach begins with identifying the limitations of the immune system in combating a particular pathogen, the vulnerabilities of that pathogen and the reasons why previous approaches have failed.

They bring to bear powerful technologies that it believes, individually or in combination, will lead to effective therapies. Having gone public in 2019, their market cap is approximately $3 billion.

As with any promising biotech company, the competition for top talent is fierce across the board. Talent acquisition leaders were charged with finding individuals passionate about their science, and they spent a lot of energy seeking to tease out from candidates whether their passion was authentic and genuine. Though six years old, their hiring processes are still very much fluid.

To stay on top of the constant flux in talent, the talent acquisition and rewards teams built separate and unique spreadsheets for pay guidelines, internal equity, offer approvals, and competition tracking, all of which were rolled up into a master Offer Development Template spreadsheet. While effective in capturing relevant information, these spreadsheets were often cumbersome and tedious tools that lacked the insights needed to stay ahead of the game in terms of talent acquisition and offer management.

They knew they needed to shift from spreadsheet hell to insight nirvana.

The Associate Director of Talent Acquisition said:

“Our spreadsheets were nice, neat, and clean, until our growth outpaced their usefulness. With so many moving parts, different terms, definitions, and inputs from various talent professionals, the spreadsheets required manual entries and became redundant and unwieldy. Over time their value diminished as a source of insights and context. We knew we needed a holistic, dashboard-driven solution with a centralized database so we could in real-time track offers and competition more effectively.”

They knew it needed to be more savvy in its talent operations as it continued to grow rapidly, and that’s when they turned to Compa for help.

In mere weeks, Compa’s customer experience team implemented Compa. As the customer continued to grow rapidly, Compa was instrumental in helping them think critically and strategically about how it wanted to implement and leverage its new, powerful ATS, Greenhouse.

Compa exceeded the Associated Director's expectations almost immediately. Not only did the talent teams retire their tedious and disparate spreadsheets, but they also experienced how offer management automation saved time, ensured compliance, and provided greater visual-driven insights into candidate offers, internal equity, trends and market forces. Specifically, implementing Compa helped this  public biotech company:

• Track its competitors to get a better handle on the market for individuals with deep expertise in immunology, infectious disease, and drug development
• Monitor win/loss talent offers in clear reports that could inform future offers
• Compare candidate expectations to competing offers versus their offer
• Secure approval of offers faster by sunsetting its Offer Development Template
• Properly frame compensation equity for internal employees

With Compa in its quiver, the customer enjoyed a slew of new insights, trends and competitive market data that had previously been opaque and difficult to assemble.

In addition to Compa’s accurate market data, their talent teams were able to dramatically improve automation, greatly increase the speed in developing and validating offers that complied with company standards, enhance data-driven conversations with top candidates, and drive productive analyses of internal equity and compensation. All of these outcomes led to improved offer management across the board and on-target completion of talent acquisition goals.

“Compa’s core value spawns from its detailed market intelligence and its impact on alignment with the comp team. I want to shift our team’s culture to use technology and real time data to our advantage, and I want to be able to show the comp team what we’re seeing in the market so we can remain on top of changing conditions. Compa exceeds these fundamental requirements and, as a result, has had a meaningful impact on our business.”

Head of Talent Acquisition

Because of Compa, they are now more efficient in attracting and landing talent in the hyper-competitive biotech space. Conversations among team members no longer must rely on tenuous data and information but rather on real-time insights in a centralized database that all team members can see and respond to. Offers that used to take many hours to produce, approve and extend, can now be accomplished in minutes via Compa.

“With spreadsheets, producing an offer felt like moving puzzle pieces on a board, pulling one thing from here and another from another sheet. It was laborious and time-consuming, with lots of starts and stops. With Compa, my ability to see all the data in one place helped support faster, more efficient decision-making and that, in turn, led to better offers and better talent coming on board.”

Associate Director, Talent Acquisition

In addition, it’s turned talent acquisition teams into a tightly aligned sales team which has been increasingly more effective in “closing” a candidate because it can leverage real-time data to do so. Compa’s platform has been instrumental in helping with their pay transparency as well as it strives to ensure equitable pay transparency in all areas of the business.