Your team needs a tech role filled ASAP. You have a great candidate, but their salary requirements are well out of the range for the role. Now you’re faced with an all too common dilemma: do you acquiesce to the salary demands, putting internal equity and/or budget parameters at risk? Or do you tell the person you can’t meet their salary requirements, knowing you needed this position filled yesterday and could lose a great candidate?
In a situation like this, it seems there’s no way to uphold internal equity, budget parameters, and market competitiveness simultaneously.
At Edgility Talent Partners, we are all too aware of the systemic inequities present in the labor market, continuously overvaluing roles in fields held by those in dominant groups (e.g., technology, marketing, construction), while significantly undervaluing roles historically held by women and people of color (e.g., education, nonprofit, mental health).
Organizations inadvertently perpetuate these gaps without intentional intervention and reimagined strategies. Equity-minded leaders want to ensure internal parity with compensation. At the same time, some roles are in much higher demand in the marketplace, making for tough decisions for leaders.
What clients share as existing solutions
Option 1
Pay a premium for ultra-competitive roles. While this will ensure you get top talent, it risks perpetuating historical market inequities and potentially compromising financial sustainability and internal equity.
Option 2
Keep roles internally equitable to keep your organization aligned with its values. This comes with the risk of losing top talent and/or of roles remaining unfilled due to other companies that will pay the premium the market suggests.
Both options seem to present an organization with an undesirable set of trade-offs that make the benefits come at a potentially too high cost. Is there a way to remain externally competitive while actively fighting against the perpetuation of role pay inequity in the labor market that continues to disadvantage women and people of color?
There is a third way
At Edgility Talent Partners, we work with organizations to build salary structures that reflect market realities while emphasizing internal equity. We do this through market and job-description analysis to create salary ranges for sets of roles with similar organizational impact and management scope, rather than individual salary ranges for every role in the organization.
For instance, if a marketing associate and a curriculum development associate contribute similarly in terms of role expectations, overall organizational impact, and management scope, why should their pay differ significantly?
Simplifying an organization’s salary structure enables greater attention to equity while still differentiating roles with varying levels of responsibility. Roles that are true outliers (i.e., they require advanced and specialized training and/or skill sets) can receive a special designation within the structure to account for this.
There are a number of ways Edgility Talent Partners coaches organizations to lean into their values while also securing top talent without sacrificing the integrity of the internal structure. We advise organizations to share the rationale and criteria with all staff so that the considerations are clear, transparent, consistent, and inclusive. This takes the guesswork out of salaries for staff and managers, thereby generating greater trust.
We have worked with a wide range of organizations, (international, EdTech, and SaaS), that see great variation in market pay across their roles. In companies where education and curriculum expertise are just as critical to organizational success as the technology and software themselves, some form of internal parity must be achieved to ensure that all staff feel valued and that organizations live out the principles they espouse.
As a result of our client engagements with organizations that fit into these categories, we have a Net Promoter Score average that says our clients are extremely likely to “… recommend Edgility Talent Partners to a friend or colleague.”
We can partner with you to develop customized solutions for your organization to the question: “How can we build a compensation structure that prioritizes internal equity and allows us to attract and retain top talent in competitive markets while remaining financially sustainable?” Contact us to learn how.
If you are ready to move beyond one-off pay decisions and build a structure that is both equitable and competitive, download Compensation with Purpose: Designing Equity-Centered Pay Structures for Nonprofits, Education, and Healthcare to learn how to create transparent, sustainable salary systems that attract and retain top talent without sacrificing your values.
Marissa McNeil
Principal
- Builds Equitable Organizations
- Talent Management Support
- Closes Wage Gaps
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