Hiring/Closing

Be careful - you can still introduce bias at this stage in the process.

What you do in the hiring stage, when you’re creating, extending and negotiating offers may not have immediate implications for your ability to assemble a diverse team. But the bias you introduce or perpetuate at this point has longstanding repercussions for fairness on the team.

Compensation

Have a compensation structure with pre-set levels and corresponding bands for salary and equity to minimize subjectivity. How do you create this?

Salary.com⁠

is a great place to start. Let’s say you need to hire your first Sales Engineer in San Francisco but you don’t know where to start in terms of figuring out how to pay this person. You can look up by title what someone in this role makes and refine by the following: location, years of experience, education, and number of direct reports. The results will show different percentiles ranging from 10th to 90th. This makes it very easy to create a salary band for Level 1 of a Sales Engineer and then build out different levels as the team grows.

Once you have your bands created for each respective function, it is up to you how transparent you want to be with this information. Some companies publish their guides for maximum transparency [

Buffer⁠

Clef⁠

]. For new grads, it’s straightforward to use standard offers. For candidates with prior experience, it can be a little trickier to level accurately, but steer clear of merely doing incremental adjustments to prior compensation numbers. That’s a great way to perpetuate accumulated historical inequities.

Promotions/level changes need to be tied to the salary ranges in corresponding levels/bands. There may be exceptions to the rule. Create an exception process with a clear approval process. Do the hiring manager and the hiring manager’s boss need to be included? HR or Finance? Map it out and make sure the process is clear. The important thing is to make sure the same process is followed every time you go through the compensation and/or promotion process.

Negotiation

Negotiation is another place where inequity creeps in. If you are a great negotiator, does that mean you should make more than a peer doing the same job? Probably not. Some candidates have help along the way (a mentor coaching them, inside information from current employees, etc.) that allows them to negotiate more effectively. If you want to have a level playing field, have a clear policy on negotiation where recruiters/hiring managers understand salary bands and an exception process for going outside of the guidelines. Recruiters can make it clear at offer stage that certain parts of the offer (base, bonus) are not negotiable. Problems arise when there’s no clear policy. It’s likely you’ll allow for negotiations with some candidates more so than with others, and possibly penalize certain candidates for trying to negotiate. Perhaps consider getting rid of negotiation in the offer process entirely, as Reddit

has done⁠

. Negotiating compensation is

empirically disadvantageous⁠

to women and minorities.

⁠