I read a post on here today from someone looking to get into Compensation/Total Rewards and one of the top comments was, “Those jobs are drying up. Anyone can do compensation with AI and some data.”
This is laughably wrong but a common assumption, even before AI. I am a Director of Total Rewards at a large, multinational organization.
Comp/TR lies at the intersection of Finance and HR. While benchmarking and analysis are crucial parts of the job, they are also very small parts of the job, especially once you get past the junior level.
Here’s the not-so-secret secret: Anyone can buy data to benchmark a job. That’s the easy part!
Here’s a more representative list of things my team does, and you will do on a regular basis:
- Listen to a tirade from the CFO about how there are too many exceptions to the standard comp processes, and have that same person ask for an exception *the very next day* because his superstar direct report got a competing offer. And not appreciating the irony.
- Having to explain to senior leadership that we can’t offer everyone 5% increases on a 3% budget
- Pushing back on a Finance Director who insists on hiring only CPAs even though it’s not required for the job and it excludes great candidates (and costs us money)
- Having the Talent Management team change the rating system every few years and somehow expecting compensation to be different just because we have fewer (or no) ratings now
- Listen to Recruiters in Europe complain about how much more money people in New York make for the same job
- Attend endless meetings on how to “motivate” people using everything but actual money
- Developing a model to show the Senior Partner that his grand plan won’t work with the current distribution of performance ratings and having him say “just make it work”, only for him to leave the firm 3 years into a 5 year implementation that you knew wasn’t going to work in year 1. You will get blamed for this.
- Answering daily emails from coworkers demanding you benchmark their role again because their friend “left and got a 30% increase for the same role”. In 90% of cases this friend is made up, and in the other 10% the role they left for is clearly a promotion
And so on. 🤓