seer salary transparency & compensation strategy

Seer Compensation StrategyNovember 2016

Prepared for: Seer Team

INTRODUCTION

© 2016 Seer Interactive • All Rights Reserved •

Background: why are we doing this?


Exit Interview Data showed that 2 in 5 employees who left Seer indicated that Career Opportunities (upward mobility) and [lack of understanding surrounding] Compensation were the largest contributing factors to their departure.

Background: why are we doing this?


I got you.


Ground Rules & Expectations


1. THIS IS CONFIDENTIAL and intended for internal use only; please respect that

2. There will be mistakes; help us to find and fix them respectfully

3. Understand that this is something that we, as a company, will live into over the next several yearsa. Creating ranges for all role levels is the first phase

4. Compensation is personal; just because someone has the same title as you ≠ same exact compensation within specified range for the role

Ground Rules & Expectations


Goals

Understanding Transparency Correlation to Performance



Immediate Immediate Immediate

● How does Seer view and manage my compensation?

● What’s my earning potential and why?

● When am I eligible for a raise?

● Access to all Seer Division & level salary ranges

● How we stack up against the market & why

● Performance matters; we’ll keep processing & assigning raises accordingly

Ultimate Ultimate Ultimate

● WHY (quantitatively) you fall within the range you’re in

● Maintain level of transparency

● How you can impact your raise

● Ability to forecast what you can expect

DIGGING IN

Philosophy


Compensation Philosophy: General


We Believe in Total Compensation


We’re competitive.

● Every year, we’re committed to completing an industry benchmarking survey to ensure that our ranges are competitive within our competitive set.

● We’ll update ranges annually to reflect market compensation to ensure that our ranges reflect the 40th to 90th + percentile of the market.

Compensation Philosophy: Cash Money


Your compensation will be reviewed at least 1x per year.

● We review your compensation once a year. But, we believe in hustle, and you’re all pretty ambitious. That means you may get more than one raise within a year...or you might wait longer than a year. However, we’ll review your compensation at least once a year.

○ Things we take into consideration:■ How are you staffed, impact to Seer, revenue, retention, task forces; additionally, future

looking, how can we staff you in the future



Performance drives compensation.

● Experience counts, but performance primarily drives compensation. Growing client accounts? Have 100% client retention? Helping mentor and grow your coworkers? Consistently working to level up & share ideas? Awesome, you’re probably paid more because of it. Twice a year you all have the opportunity to opt-in to performance reviews to understand how you’re doing performance-wise. [current state]


Tool, Process, Methodology


Considerations:● Goal

● Current state

● Resources other agencies / companies use

● Output / variability in different resources vs. cost

Tool


Identify All Roles & Respective Skills

Create Role Bank Define Competitive Set

Define Percentiles per Role

Build Ranges per Role

Process


Process

Step One: Role build-out

➔ Identify ALL roles within company / DIVs

➔ “Shop” several relevant skills within Payscale to create a bank of skills relevant for each role within each division.

◆ Survey team to identify top three skills required for their job [role + level]

➔ Collaborate with Division Directors to cross-check & adjust skills identified by the team as appropriate

➔ Finalized top three required skills for each role


Process

Step Two: Create role bank

➔ To create ‘role bank’ determine and build the following for each role level in the company:

◆ Seer title vs. Industry Recognized title

◆ Three top skills

◆ Years of experience required [MINIMUM] for each role level

◆ Define people management experience & type for each role level

◆ Add location parameters


Process

Step Three: Define industry competitive set

➔ Defining industry competitive set:

◆ Company size [number of employees]

◆ Type of company

◆ Industry

◆ Privately held / not publicly traded

◆ Location(s)

Note: “Who do we want to compete with” was considered. I.e., should we broaden size, shift parameters to go outside of our competitive set as it relates to compensation.


For every role, we ‘shopped’ the following parameters to come up with five percentiles of compensation:

Process

● Location [PHL vs. SD]

● Type of company [privately held]

● Industry of company [Marketing & advertising]

● Size of company [# of employees]

● Industry-recognized title

● Top three skills required

● Years of experience [MIN] for each role level

● People management experience required

● TYPE of people management experience required

○ Assigning and evaluating work vs. hiring, firing, setting compensation, etc

Step Four: Define percentiles


per·cen·tile/pərˈsenˌtīl/

A percentile (or a centile) is a measure used in statistics indicating the value below which a given percentage of observations in a group of observations fall. For example, 20th percentile is the value (or score) below which 20% of the observations may be found.


Step Four: QA data // spot check percentiles pulled

➔ Re-run criteria built in role bank to confirm no inconsistencies in data …

AND THEN...

Process


Inconsistent Data.Everywhere.


Step Four: Define percentiles per role

➔ Data changes all the time. The numbers that you run will differ from the percentiles shared with you.

➔ To most accurately build ranges that reflect data fluctuations, all roles were pulled a total of 5 times over the course of a two week period.

➔ Once we had 2 weeks of data, we averaged each percentile.

◆ So, for example, each percentile you see [10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th] is the average of 5 different data pulls for that specific percentile.

◆ Data was scrubbed for any large variances. e.g., if there was an up or downswing in a day of ~10K, that data was removed from the set by which the average percentile was built.

Process


Percentiles Example

Comp Percentiles

10th 25th 50th 75th 90th PHL

$xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx SEO Associate

$xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx Sr. SEO Associate

$xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx SEO Manager

$xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx Sr. SEO Manager

$xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx Team Lead


Step Five: Build ranges per role

➔ Review data

➔ Consider “Seer data”

◆ Role difference across divisions & impact to Seer

◆ Division size / revenue

◆ Career trajectory; considering roles where someone may choose to stay vs. move on (want to enable this and ensure earning potential exists)

➔ Determine where we are comfortable falling for ranges across the board; put a stake in the ground. e.g., our range minimum doesn’t dip below 40th percentile and extends to 90th sometimes far exceeding 90th percentile for specific roles

➔ Federal Overtime Legislation

Process


Step Five: Review ranges with Division Directors

➔ Identify any issues / challenges with proposed ranges

➔ Identify team members that are outliers within ranges

➔ Confirm adjustments & payroll cycle adjustments will take place to communicate to team members

Process

IMPACT: IMMEDIATE + FUTURE

Impact: Immediate


Impact: Immediate

You could be impacted in two ways:

● Your salary is under the minimum role level range

● Your salary exceeds the maximum for your role level range



● Your salary is under the minimum role level range: we’ve already met and it’s been adjusted

● Your salary exceeds the maximum for your role level range

Impact: Immediate



● Your salary is under the minimum role level range: we’ve already met and it’s been adjusted

● Your salary exceeds the maximum for your role level range: we’ll meet and discuss. Don’t worry, no one’s salary is going to be decreased!

Impact: Immediate

Impact: Future



Immediate Immediate Immediate

● How does Seer view and manage my compensation?

● What’s my earning potential and why?

● When am I eligible for a raise?

● Access to all Seer Division & level salary ranges

● How we stack up against the market & why

● Performance matters; we’ll keep processing & assigning raises accordingly

Ultimate Ultimate Ultimate

● WHY (quantitatively) you fall within the range you’re in

● Maintain level of transparency

● How you can impact your raise

● Ability to forecast what you can expect

Raise Cadence & Process


There are two types of raises that can occur:

● On-cycle

● Off-cycle



Raise Cadence & ProcessOn-cycle raises

● Occur once a year at the same time each year

● Compensation is / will be reviewed annually at the time of your Seer anniversary

● Performance warranted raises occur at this time (with or without a promotion)



Process [Immediate / Current]:

● Conversation with your Director

● Your director will reach out to schedule time to chat with you to discuss compensation at the time of your employee anniversary

● Raise is communicated [or not] and email confirmation sent to you, Finance, People Team for processing

On-cycle raises

Process [Future]:

● More involvement at Team Lead level

● Direct correlation between performance review(s) + raise amount

● Ability to forecast how this conversation will go in advance


Raise Cadence & ProcessOff-cycle raises

● Occur… yep, you guessed it, off of the regular cycle (i.e., your Seer anniversary cycle)

● Occur because you’ve been kicking major ass + working hard so one of the following things is happening:

○ You’re being promoted!○ You’re taking on a brand new role!○ You’re shifting into a new role within an existing Division [just changing your career-course a

bit!]○ You’re in the same role but taking on additional responsibility and having major impact on the

company!

● Any promotion or position shift with new / additional responsibilities (unless it’s a completely lateral shift) will warrant a raise


Raise Cadence & ProcessOff-cycle raises

Process [current]:

● Team Lead or Director will schedule time with you & communicate promotion

● Promotion & raise will be confirmed via email to you, Finance, and People Team for processing

● People Team will work with you on #promotioncommotion

How can YOU impact this? [future]

● Consider what you want; are you gunning for something?

● Understand what you need to do / have experience with to get it

● Tell people what you’re aiming for, namely, your Team Lead and Director

● Set goals, measure progress, work & check in on how you’re doing … even if it’s not an official performance review

Performance Integration



Current State: Performance matters and is taken into consideration for all compensation decisions

Things that are reviewed internally / discussed:

● Current role level

● Staffing: current projects vs. projects that you’re slated for [More complex? Larger revenue? More responsibility?]

● Accomplishments over some period of time [6-12 months]

● Ambition [what have you run with?]

● Overall impact to the company [task forces, team player / helping to grow others, culture, etc]

Although you might not notice, the bullets above although worded differently, are all item outlined and reflected in our performance anchors.


We’re going to keep on doing what we’ve been doing for the time being. Why?

● It’s the right thing to do, it’s fair.

During Phase Two, the primary focus is performance integration:

● Making refinements

● Implementing appropriate system and process to support needs

● Launching this!


SALARY RANGES

Range Groupings


Seer Divisions + Role Considerations:

● Difference / variance in cost of job specific “skill”

● Seer role vs. industry definition○ Does a PPC Manager’s role differ from an SEO Manager’s role? There are a different set of

skills required, but foundationally, these roles do the same thing for the company.

● Revenue of Division○ Does the revenue of the Division appropriately warrant the compensation rate extended to the

team? It’s the same mentality of “start-ups” typically paying less until they’ve established some footing.

● Impact / value of role to Seer○ Does the value that a certain Division or role drives warrant a greater differential in

compensation? In general, we didn’t see any roles fall into this category.

Seer Salary Ranges: Ranges & Logic


To be fair & equitable, and in some cases, to protect confidentiality within small Divisions, we created location-specific Role Groupings.

The following disciplines are grouped together and share the same range minimums and maximums for all role levels:

● SEO, Technical SEO, & PPC

● ANA

● CRE: Design, Dev, & Project Management

● CE: Client Engagement

● Business Strategy: Business Strategy & Marketing

● Operations: People, Account / FIN, IT, & Office Management


Let’s walk through an example...


Percentiles

10th 25th 50th 75th 90th

SEO Associate

$xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx

Tech SEO Associate


PPC Associate


Let’s walk through an example: Associate [PHL] - SEO, Tech SEO, PPC



Philadelphia Associate: SEO, Tech SEO, PPC

Variance in Cost of Skill

Seer role vs. industry definition

Revenue of Division Impact / value of role to Seer

Small Min: $1.6kMax: $3k

Similar Close Equal

Role Grouping Example

Ultimate decision: Group SEO, Tech SEO, and PPC together

Seer Salary Ranges


Philadelphia

SEO, Technical SEO, PPC

Role Seer Min. Payscale Min. Seer Max. Payscale Max.

Associate $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx

Sr. Associate $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx

Manager $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx

Sr. Manager $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx

Team Lead $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx

Sr. Team Lead $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx

Associate DIR $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx


Philadelphia

Analytics








Philadelphia

Creative, Design, Dev, Project Manager








Philadelphia

Client Engagement






Philadelphia

Business Strategy, Marketing








Philadelphia

Operations: People, Accounting/Finance, IT, Office mgmt








San Diego

SEO, Technical SEO, PPC







Sr. Team Lead $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx

Associate DIR $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx


San Diego

Client Engagement






Philadelphia & San Diego

Executive Leadership: Directors


Director $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx

RANGE FAQs


“I’m at the bottom of my range...why?”


“You talked about a ~2K differential in using the paid version of payscale, that 2K matters to me!”


“I’m pretty far from the top of my range...and I’ve been with Seer for a little over 2 years?”


“What if I’m at the top of my range?”


“What if I get promoted, but my current compensation is above the minimum for the role I’m promoted into?”


“How do you make the determination of where a new hire will fall within a range?”


“I feel like I’m underpaid, I’d like to understand more about ranges and why I fall where I do.”


“I’ve been getting feedback that I’ve been absolutely “killing it” over the last two months; can I expect a raise sooner than a year?”


“What if my anniversary just passed? Should I have gotten a raise?”

NEXT STEPS


Next Steps

● Deck + content arsenal to be shared out to company by EOD

● Specific compensation appointment slots with Em / Directors to discuss / ask questions on wiki [Employee Resources → Compensation]

● Video to be produced and available in Q1 to watch @ anytime [will be segmented]

● Q1 start to Phase Two; timeline and roll-out / launch plans to be shared in 2017 Company Kick-Off Meeting


Supporting Resources

Submit your quick one-off questions here

Request a meeting with Em + your Division Director here

Seer Salary Ranges

Compensation Philosophy One-Sheeter

Payscale benchmarking raw data [to run a report on your own]

FAQs

The end.

To learn more about the process of launching compensation strategy and salary transparency at our company, visit our website!

http://www.seerinteractive.com/labs/about/salary-transparency/?utm_source=slideshare&utm_medium=shared+resource&utm_campaign=seer+labs