From a highly manual benchmarking process to instant access to salary benchmark data
The Challenge:
Salary benchmark research used to involve weeks of finding and combining multiple sources - with the team struggling to find accurate data for specific roles in a niche industry.
The Solution:
Compensation IQ’s large dataset removed the risk of skewed results, with benchmarks clearly compared to Instant Impact’s salaries - leaving time for them to prioritise pay equity.
‘It’s about the journey, not the destination’.
It may be a wise adage, but that’s not the case when it comes to your pay reviews. When salary benchmarking becomes a lengthy, manual, research-intensive process, it means the desired outcomes can be lost. After all, pay reviews are more than a tick-box exercise. They have a purpose: to improve employee retention, satisfaction, and productivity.
Instant Impact discovered a faster, easier way to tackle salary benchmarking - leaving them space to focus on fairness when it comes to compensation.
Instant Impact: global workforce & a lean People Team
Instant Impact provides talent solutions to medium-sized businesses, focused on industries in the professional services. They let you fully or partially outsource your recruitment processes and offer consulting services too - so their own talent needs are highly varied.
Currently, they have a large UK-based team - but also have other teams in South Africa and Thailand, so they’re dealing with a globally dispersed workforce. That can be a challenge, especially when HR and Operations are managed by a modest team. We spoke to Angharad, the Senior People and Culture Partner, about the challenges of navigating a range of responsibilities related to onboarding and employee relations, and finding time to prioritise organisational goals.
The challenge: pay reviews before Compensation IQ
- Time-intensive, manual salary research process
- Hard-to-benchmark job titles, in a niche industry
- Team structure evolution meant new in-house roles
- New prioritisation of pay transparency and equity
"We’ve committed to our team that we’ll be salary benchmarking every six months, and communicating transparently, so they can see how we got to our pay decisions."
Instant Impact used to take multiple weeks to research salary benchmarks. They had considered using a major salary benchmarking consultancy, but didn’t have the budget - leaving them to utilise the resources they had to hand. That involved trawling through job boards and LinkedIn listings (and hoping they actually advertised their salaries transparently), asking ChatGPT, and combining all of that with their own candidate data. A thorough process, but this time-intensive process had limitations…
As a niche industry staffed with a variety of service providers, finding accurate salary benchmarks is particularly difficult - as they compensate differently to more straightforward, in-house roles. And coupled with a recent evolution to their team structure, and the hiring of new roles the organisation didn’t used to have, pay reviews were becoming complex.
"Internally, another challenge is understanding pay equity across the business. That’s something we’re really trying to focus on at the moment, to ensure that internal equity is there and that the team is paid fairly both in relation to market rates and their colleagues."
This meant that salary benchmarking couldn’t be a regular event. For some organisations, that reality would be quickly accepted - but Instant Impact had decided that pay transparency and equity were things they wanted to prioritise.
A worthwhile effort, but this is all competing with other organisational priorities - including responding to the current economic climate this year’s rise in National Insurance. That’s where the affordability and time-saving qualities of Compensation IQ really come into play.
"Rather than using a major salary consultancy, I’d actually prefer a trusted tool I can jump into when I’m asked pay questions - because they come up at different times, like when we’re recruiting for new roles and need to benchmark them."
The solution: pay reviews after Compensation IQ
- Instant access to relevant salary benchmark data
- A large dataset for confidence in pay decisions
- Useful visual overviews for sharing with leaders
- Ability to commit to 6-monthly pay benchmarking
The nature of Instant Impact’s work means they talk to a lot of service providers - so they’re always on the lookout for the best new HR technology. They started using Compensation IQ for their latest pay review process, and quickly discovered the benefits of having instant access to such a large amount of reliable, relevant data. With filters for industry, location, company size, and other factors, it suited the needs of their global team.
The platform complemented their existing research methods, allowing Instant Impact to combine Compensation IQ's data with their own candidate information. By connecting their own HR data, they could get a comprehensive overview comparing multiple external data sources with their own team's compensation, including the distribution of their teams and salaries.. Suddenly, that research stage was dramatically reduced - letting Angharad and her team focus on the priorities of more frequent benchmarking exercises, and a greater focus on pay equity.
"There’s a lot of benchmarks on there. Compensation IQ is capturing a lot of data, and that’s what stood out to me - and having a lot of benchmarks gives me a lot of confidence, because I know the slightest outlier can skew figures up or down, when you have a small data set, which affects the accuracy of the data."
Getting sign-off for pay decisions can always be challenging, but the breadth of Compensation IQ’s data gave the team confidence - as did the ability to present a clear breakdown to their leadership team, supporting that compensation conversation.
Final Takeaways: instant Impact & Compensation IQ
With Instant Impact’s commitment to their staff for more frequent, transparent salary benchmarking periods, we’re excited to go on this journey with them. We’re also proud to be a part of their commitment to pay equity, both within their own workforce and in comparison to the broader market. Because we’re all striving to grow - including at Compensation IQ.
Instant Impact spoke highly of our Product team’s helpful and responsive approach, and that we’re open to feedback from all our customers - so we can make sure your needs are being met. As our product grows and evolves, we’ll be able to support their organisational priorities when it comes to compensation.
