Throughout an employee’s lifecycle, many compensation decisions lead to pay inequities — but no decision is as important as starting salary. Since raises are usually a percentage of an employee’s base salary, if there’s a pay gap on the first day of work, that earning gap just widens over time. A long-held fear in salary negotiations is if you get the numbers wrong to begin with, they’re stuck forever. Start low, stay low.
In May 2021, we introduced Pay Finder to address starting pay head on. Pay Finder provides insights and recommendations to guide compensation decisions and ensure starting salaries are competitive and equitable, stopping pay problems before they start. Our first version was created for compensation team members. It not only includes starting pay recommendations but also allows users to see the impact of a job candidate’s prospective pay on existing pay equity. Now we’ve expanded Pay Finder to empower more compensation stakeholders to make equitable starting pay decisions.
Launching Pay Finder standalone view for recruiters
For Pay Finder to have maximum impact, we knew we needed to get the solution into the hands of the decision makers on the front lines. So we developed a Pay Finder standalone view — purpose-built for recruiters, HR business partners, and others involved in the compensation decision-making process — to allow organizations to scale truly equitable compensation.
Recruiting top talent is difficult. Our new version of Pay Finder provides recruiters with a straightforward tool for determining an offer that’s not only competitive with the external market, but also internally equitable. It allows recruiters to make more effective pay decisions, ultimately closing candidates faster and more fairly and improving the odds of attracting, hiring, and retaining the right people.
Recruiters typically rely on market surveys to ensure a candidate is in range. But, an exact offer often hinges on a candidate’s salary expectations. Starting pay gaps stem partly from the “expectation gap,” the difference in compensation expectations between groups — which, in particular, undercut women, as well as Black, Indigenous, and other candidates of color. Research from Hired.com shows groups paid less also expect lower salaries than their white, male counterparts — even when they have the same experience. For example, on average, Black women expect salaries 10% lower than those of their white male counterparts.
Instead of relying on a candidate’s expectations, the recruiter can now tailor an offer, reassuring the candidate the organization has a systemic approach in place for paying everyone fairly and consistently.
Here’s how it works: Standalone users search for a job and enter key characteristics about the candidate to get a recommended pay range. This range accounts for the organization’s market-informed scale for the job, as well as what’s equitable based on employees who do substantially similar work. The standalone interface is simple and easy to use.
Since recruiter autonomy and data access can vary greatly, the standalone version is highly customizable, so every organization can fine tune it based on their people, policies, and needs. For example, you can choose to show recruiters ranges for current employees and customize escalation messages.
Pay Finder leverages data from your larger pay equity analysis in PayEQ, but it allows other stakeholders to view a subset of that data specifically for making start salary decisions. It automates alignment without revealing all of the sensitive information from your analysis.
Decisions for jobs associated with potential pay equity issues can be auto-escalated to the compensation team. They can fully consider the big picture. Pay Finder takes the guesswork out of compensation by delivering a level of detail never before available.
Recruiters and other compensation decision makers can now make precise offers without putting internal pay equity at risk. Comp teams can back up their recommendations with hard data and reduce recruiter exceptions with targeted information. More information and more transparency lead to better results for everyone. It keeps your organization equitable on a daily, sustainable basis.
Equitable compensation is a brand imperative. It should be a day-in-day-out principle for every business. Pay Finder arms you with a comprehensive approach and toolkit for pay equity, incorporating fairness in every starting pay decision. Start fair, stay fair.
Learn more about Pay Finder and register for a demo here.
