For fledgling startups looking to hire new talent, it’s not enough to make one-time decisions about pay when each new employee comes on board. Constructing a coherent philosophy around pay is critical for a company to stay consistent over the long term and provide transparency to employees — essentially coming up with the “why” and “how” behind pay decisions.
In today’s job market, where layoffs and layoffs abound, getting the right compensation strategy is even more important, HR tech startup CEO Rani Mavram Completely told ukbusinessupdates.com in an interview.
“Even as companies take on fewer roles, the importance of getting that higher entitlement becomes increasingly important,” Mavram said.
Complete aims to help companies, especially early stage startups, devise and implement a company-wide compensation strategy that reflects cash, equity, bonuses and benefits.
Screenshots of Complete .’s Compensation Strategy Platform Image Credits: Completely
“We are working with them on [questions like], will you be making negotiable offers or non-negotiable offers? Are you going to give your candidates multiple options when you think about pay raises and bonuses? Is that something related to performance, or are you going to do that by default for everyone? So within these broader segments of reward, we’re distilling them and then helping them connect to what’s right for their business,” explained Mavram.
Complete offers an interactive offer letter product for candidates applying for positions at its client companies and has recently begun offering a similar product to help employees understand what their total compensation includes, Mavram said.
Mavram co-founded and ran the company with CTO Zack Field Complete last year Y Combinator Winter 2022 cohort. Mavram used to work on the product team at Google, while Field’s background is in engineering at several late-stage startups, including Uber and Opendoor, the pair told ukbusinessupdates.com.
Mavram saw her team at Google grow rapidly and face the challenges of getting the “compensation story” right, she said.
“Even after I left Google, I tried to think more about whether the Googles of the world are experiencing this pain. How does this feel for an early stage startup that was just starting to have this conversation for the first time?” Mavram mused.
Field, meanwhile, saw his employers go from private to public and eventually became the go-to resource among his colleagues for information on how to understand their stock compensation because he had done so much research on the subject, he said.
“For some of our entry-level clients, they haven’t even set a level — like they don’t even have a software engineer and a software engineer two. And so that’s a level of education that once they’ve developed that philosophy, they can share it with employees. I’d say the fidelity of information we’re most focused on is actually how your compensation is built up, or what we call total rewards,” Mavram said.
The company just announced it has raised $4 million in seed funding led by Accel. Other participants in the raise include Y Combinator and angel investors from Calm, Opendoor and Stripe, according to Complete.
It’s far from the only startup working to unravel compensation decisions. Series A Startup OpenComp has a similar product aimed at high-growth companies looking to improve their recruitment and retention, while the YC-supported Compound aims to help technical employees understand their own pay.
“Compensation is one of the ways individuals develop trust with their employer,” Mavram said. Companies that are proactive about compensation decisions and prioritize transparency can turn their compensation strategy into a competitive advantage, she added.
Complete hopes to further expand its support for the administrative tasks associated with making a new hire, Mavram said.
With young startups, the founders themselves are often the ones thinking about how much stock to offer a new hire, so Complete’s product aims to help them understand how different paths affect their business and capitalization. Complete currently focuses on helping companies make rationale behind their compensation decisions, although ultimately companies can still choose which parts of that information they want to share with their employees.
Mavram hopes to expand Complete’s five-member team by taking on more engineering and design to help the company keep up with new customer demand, she said. Complete works with major clients including Vercel and DataStax, as well as previous companies such as Convex and TrueNorth. While Mavram declined to share how many customers Complete works with in total, a company spokesperson said it has provided analytics for several thousand salaries.
“In the long run, I hope every company has a reward philosophy, or [knows] what it means to compensate,” said Mavram. “I hope success for us looks like, every company we work with, or even broader, in the startup space, has one on their website, whether it’s on their career page or next to their privacy policy, and that’s going to be the status quo of what it means to have thought this through carefully.”
