Welcome to the Use Case Podcast, episode 205. Today we have Kaitlyn from Pequity about the use case or business case for why her customers use Pequity.
As CEO & Co-Founder behind Pequity, she is the company’s go-to jedi-master for all things compensation and human resources related, and the company’s key decision maker on company direction.
Pequity’s goal is to enable better pay decisions and to simplify compensation.
Show length: 30 minutes
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Kaitlyn Knopp
Kaitlyn is the founder of Pequity, a digital compensation platform that is aiming to combat pay inequality and help de-complicate compensation for HR teams. Her past experience running HR and compensation teams includes time at Google, Cruise Automation, Instacart and Lockheed Martin to name a few.
Follow FollowMusic: Welcome to RecruitingDaily’s Use Case podcast, a show dedicated to the storytelling that happens or should happen when practitioners purchase technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better. As we speak with the brightest minds in recruitment and HR tech, that’s what we do. Here’s your host, William Tincup.
William Tincup: Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tincup, and you are listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today, we have Kaitlyn on from Pequity, and we are learning about the use case or business case for why prospects become customers and why customers stay customers of Pequity. And without any further ado, Kaitlyn, would you introduce both yourself and Pequity?
Kaitlyn Knopp: Hi. Yes. Thank you, William. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
William Tincup: Sure.
Kaitlyn Knopp: So a bit about me and Pequity. I always like to tell people that my background has thoroughly been compensation and HR. I now have a little corny joke that I like to say. “Well, you don’t see many kids dressed up as comp analysts for Halloween.” And that was certainly true. For me, I was in school. I knew I wanted to have my own business. I grew up in a family business, and I just felt I was going to be unemployable. I was like, “Oh my goodness, what can I do that will help me towards this goal?”
And I realized that humans are 90% of your assets as well as 90% reliability. And so HR seemed like a great space. I had statistics, which I loved. And so I went all in, graduated with my Master’s, and landed on the Google Comp and Bens team. And that was where I got to see a well-funded, well-rounded, well-resourced compensation program from start to finish. And it was just amazing how much they cared about their people. And they built all these tools and processes to make sure that they were maintaining an equitable and fair program. And then I went, after four years, to a startup, and it was the exact opposite experience. There [crosstalk 00:01:36]-
William Tincup: The intentions were there.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yes. They did care. That’s why they hired me, right. They were like, “Hey, we really to be a fair and equitable place. We just don’t know where to start.”
William Tincup: Yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: And that company was Cruise Automation. So they’re much bigger now. They’ve taken off. They’re building autonomous vehicles that are now on the road. And I was employee 180, but we had to come up with a system from the ground floor. And I had no tools, no engineers, [inaudible 00:02:06] unlimited resources to put this together. So I just hired this amazing team around me. We built a couple of in-house tools to take over our office process, the comp cycles, range creation. All these things that are very tedious in the world of comp. And it was really successful. We scaled from 180 to 1500 employees in about a year and a half. I was very tired after that.
And I realized, “No, having invested so deeply in the space, I really wanted to find that business idea.” So I left, began to do some experimenting with ideas and consulting as well. And all of my… Not a lot of but a lot of my friends in the comp and HR space started to call me and say, “Hey, that thing that you built, that was so cool. Can you come to my company and do that? Can you replicate it?” And after the fourth, fifth, sixth phone call, you’re like, “Oh, this probably should be my idea.”
So I leaned in. I had gone to Instacart at the time. They’re an amazing employer who actually were one of our first users. And after six months there, I was like, “This is it. I need to start building.” And I didn’t look back. I firmly believed that I had a system in place that helped automate many of the workflows that take up a lot of time, not just for comp teams and HR teams but for managers, and employees, and candidates.
And I wanted to streamline that entire process as well as offer these analytics and boundaries that can help people stay within an equitable and fair world. And as soon as we launched it, the market need was there. It was imminent. Everyone, with COVID going remote, felt it. Everyone was adjusting comp. There was this lack of process in the system on how to handle that.
So the timing was just so right for us to kind of dive and say, “We’re here.” And we now have four different product features for helping with all kinds of programs. But it really comes back to that core of, “I wanted to build a company that help make the world a better place.” And what a better place to start than with compensation, which is what everyone goes to work for every day.
William Tincup: I love that. Let’s go with the four features. Take us through the four features.
Kaitlyn Knopp: So our first feature was what we call, ranges internally. We essentially helped… We automated the process of creating and sharing ranges within a company with very strong permission. So if you have market data, or we can help you get the market data if you don’t have it. We’ll create these best practice pay ranges for you to fit the roles and levels at your company. [crosstalk 00:04:32]-
William Tincup: Real quickly. Real quickly, Caitlyn, for the-
Kaitlyn Knopp: Okay.
William Tincup: … non-comp geeks.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yes.
William Tincup: Outside data, external data, it could be BLM. It could be, or BLS [crosstalk 00:04:43]-
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yes.
William Tincup: It could be from PayScale or Salary.com or whatever, but external, but also internal. If it’s a large enough company, they also have some data points there, right?
Kaitlyn Knopp: Exactly. Actually, one of the selling points with Pequity is that by running your decisions through the platform, we collect all of your internal data points for you from a [crosstalk 00:05:03] comp perspective so that you can actually use that in future iterations. Because to your point. Yes, you should be looking internal. You should know where your attrition is, where your [inaudible 00:05:12] in the clients are. And we do work with Salary.com, BLS, any of those kind of free mass source sources.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Or you can go to the companies such as Option Impact, Radford, Mercer, Towers Watson. Those are the ones that are most commonly seen in tech. And if it’s data, our team can use it. And in four to six week, get you propped up with ranges that are shareable and usable for your team.
William Tincup: That’s location specific or is it-
Kaitlyn Knopp: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
William Tincup: … roles and skills specific? What? How do you…
Kaitlyn Knopp: It’s both. I have a methodology that I enjoy, and it kind of takes flavors from the Google time and also consulting with tons of startups. We will construct it to fit your business. We work with crypto companies. We work with biotech companies. We work with traditional tech, autonomous vehicle. A lot of these companies have these hybrid roles. If you’re in biotech, you might have researchers or people with, I want to say, medical backgrounds.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: And they have to come into the tech world, and you’re issuing equity to them, which is not typical in a hospital system. Autonomous vehicles. The thing I experienced at Cruise, there was no such thing as an autonomous vehicle engineer when I-
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: …was purchasing these surveys. So we were inventing it. And that came from looking at Radford, and Mercer, Towers Watson, as well as general motors had a ton of data on vehicle technicians.
And we said, “What do we need if we have a mechatronics engineer who’s also doing some firmware software combinations. How do we comp that individual based on the data that we can find?” And we have a very, because we’ve so many times now, a super scalable process that can get it done for you way faster. And we partner with a lot of these data companies to help you get access to that data quicker too. And have in-house experts throughout the entire process who basically act as customer success managers who will help you make those decisions.
So if you come to us and you’re like, “I just need a system. I don’t know where to start.” We can help you if you come and you’re like, “I have 12 levels. I’m hiring in 15 different regions, and I already have ranges. I just want to update it.” We can also help you there. So that was our very first offering that we ever launched. And obviously, once you build ranges, the next thing we had to focus on was, “Well, it’s great to of them, but how do you deploy them, and how do you ensure people are staying in range and using them appropriately?” So that was our first, I would say, large feature, which was our offers tool, which people have oddly dubbed the recruiter workbench.
William Tincup: [inaudible 00:07:55].
How [crosstalk 00:07:57] get off the rails? Just out of curiosity, is that a manager? Is that an employee asking, negotiating well, et cetera? Is it a recruiter kind of overstepping? Because I can see that getting off the rails really quickly. And I’m just wondering how does it get off the rails?
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yeah. Well, you kind of hit all of them. I mean, it’s sort of this mess of, there is no tool that does it. So everyone is shooting towards the same goal.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: And there’s this time constraint, right. When a candidate is ready for an offer, it’s like we have to get that to them immediately because time matters.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: And so you have the recruiter sprint towards it. The managers sprinting towards it, the comp team, and they’re all operating out of spreadsheets in email and Slack. And so miscommunications happen. Sometimes someone doesn’t see that email, or they didn’t get the alert. Maybe you do have a ticketing system to make these decisions, Googled it, but you can’t get through them fast enough because of the volume, right.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: And the next thing you know…
William Tincup: Candidate’s gone.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yeah, candidate’s gone, or the recruiter or manager very fairly have to make a decision to just make an offer, right.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: They’ll just…
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: … say what [crosstalk 00:09:15]-
William Tincup: Then it’s the wild west at that point.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yeah. Exactly.
William Tincup: It becomes the wild west. And it’s interesting because… and you’re probably dealing with this across all four of the features. But the product, in general, is comp, and TA haven’t necessarily worked-
Kaitlyn Knopp: Oh no.
William Tincup: … well together in the past. We’ll just keep it vague.
Kaitlyn Knopp: There’s friction there.
William Tincup: Okay. All right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: For sure.
William Tincup: Just want to lay that base for folks. Okay. So what’s after deploy?
Kaitlyn Knopp: Well, so once we have the tool in place for teams, it actually… Early days, I told people, “This will help solve that friction that you’re referencing” where I no longer as a comp manager, I used to feel like the bottleneck.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: I would get an offer. They’d say, “Hey, I have two hours get an offer out.” And I was like, “Oh my goodness. I have to get the data. I need to get the information from my HRS. I have to make sure it’s documented somewhere to stay compliant. And I also have all these meetings I have to take. I have a day job.”
William Tincup: Yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: And that is now solved with Pequity because we integrate to your workflow. We integrate to your ATS. The second you’re ready to make an offer, we have a little icon that pops up in your ATS for the recruiter. It pumps them into Pequity. It pulls the relevant data from your rec directly into our platform. And we match it based on that rec info to the correct range and data that needs to show for the recruiter. And so-
William Tincup: Oh, that’s perfect.
So they can see it almost in real time.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Almost. I mean pretty much seconds.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: And the other cool thing that we really… I really care about fair pay and the way that these decisions really impact people, especially there are certain groups that don’t negotiate as well. They’re not on that tendency to fight for the [crosstalk 00:11:01]-
William Tincup: I’m still fascinated. I know you probably are going to have a take on this. I’m fascinated that negotiation has anything to do with the job.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
William Tincup: Unless the job is negotiating, right. Okay, fair enough. But if you’re a software engineer, why does it come down to whether or not you’re a good or a poor negotiator?
Kaitlyn Knopp: Ugh, you’re speaking my language.
William Tincup: Okay.
Kaitlyn Knopp: I couldn’t agree more.
William Tincup: I just don’t get that.
Kaitlyn Knopp: I have a personal… Well, you do need flexibility in comp, right.
William Tincup: Yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Because there are people who come, and they will say, “I care more about cash right now. I [crosstalk 00:11:37]-”
William Tincup: Right. Fair.
Kaitlyn Knopp: … equity. Maybe I have a newborn at home. I really want to make sure that I am taking care of these new expenses.” Very fair. And that’s the world of negotiation that I think is gray. Where it’s like, “Okay. I understand. We need flexibility. We need this.” And we’re also adapting as comp professionals to what every other company in the industry is doing. So a great example this year was that a ton of companies, they were issuing equity. They used to have a one-year cliff. So you didn’t get any equity in year one-
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: … on the one year mark [inaudible 00:12:06] or started [inaudible 00:12:08]. And a ton of companies took that away. And the rationale that we heard from many of them was they were like, “Well, I want to start vesting my employees immediately.”
William Tincup: Yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: “So that I don’t have to issue as many sign-ons.” It helps increase year one comp without increasing cash.
William Tincup: Not only that, but you can use systems like Carta, which you’ll keep-
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yep.
William Tincup: … the cap table extremely straight and it does all of that stuff for you and people… It’s interesting because, psychologically, they get an email from Carta or any of those systems.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
William Tincup: And it’s like, that’s an incentive. Like, okay. You have so many shares vested this month or this week or whatever the bid is.” It’s like, “Oh, cool.”
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yeah.
William Tincup: “I didn’t even know that just happened, but all right. Cool. [inaudible 00:12:53].” So I can see that move. For the folks that care about equity.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yes.
William Tincup: I could wallpaper a small house with stock options that are completely worthless. But that being said-
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yep.
William Tincup: … I can see where people would care about that. Okay. So I got workflow. ATSs that you’re integrated with you can integrate with anybody?
Kaitlyn Knopp: We have 22 ATSs that we integrate with [inaudible 00:13:18].
William Tincup: Okay.
Kaitlyn Knopp: If we don’t have, it takes us two weeks. But all we do is we pull them in. We show stats on how the offer compares to the range.
William Tincup: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kaitlyn Knopp: The recruiter can record competing comp information. They can also see anonymized internal peers at the company-
William Tincup: Oh, nice.
Kaitlyn Knopp: … to see how does this compare to other people on the teams? And once they send it, they had sent for approval. It’ll autoroute to the right approvers based on the roles, the level, the location, and how the comp compares to the range. So you-
William Tincup: What if it’s a company that’s trying to take location out of the…
Kaitlyn Knopp: Equation for that?
William Tincup: … equation? Yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: [crosstalk 00:13:55]-
William Tincup: And I’ll give you my background on this.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Oh, yeah.
William Tincup: I got in trouble with Indeed. They asked me to write an article. But I wrote an article about location-based pay, actually hiding pay inequities that we hide behind it or historically we’ve hidden behind. It’s like Bobby lives in New York. Janet lives in Topeka. They do the exact same job. Have the exact same experience with the same school because Bobby lives in New York, he gets paid 40% more.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yeah.
William Tincup: Now I think I’ve historically looked at that as a cop-out. You’re paying for a job. Just because someone chooses to live in New York because that’s a choice. So-
Kaitlyn Knopp: Well-
William Tincup: … I know you’re going to see that differently.
Kaitlyn Knopp: No. It’s [crosstalk 00:14:36]-
William Tincup: But I got in trouble. I got my hand slapped.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Oh, no, no.
Oh, I could see for some comp people, it causes a lot of debate, right.
William Tincup: I guess.
Kaitlyn Knopp: This is a hot topic-
William Tincup: Yes.
Kaitlyn Knopp: … number. And the way that I look at it, it has to come from a principled approach.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: And I think that a lot of comp is subjective, right. The argument I often tell people, if we are in San Francisco, if we use a cost of living justification for things-
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: … then if someone bought a penthouse and lived alone in the downtown financial district, they have [crosstalk 00:15:12] two cars.
William Tincup: That’s…
Kaitlyn Knopp: [inaudible 00:15:13]. That’s [crosstalk 00:15:15]-
William Tincup: … $18,000, right. Just [crosstalk 00:15:16].
Kaitlyn Knopp: Oh my God.
William Tincup: Yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: I can imagine that being somewhat like 20, 30. I can’t even imagine-
William Tincup: Oh, yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: … how that [crosstalk 00:15:22].
William Tincup: Oh, yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: And if that’s what they choose to do, if they’re in the same role level location theoretically, like same office, as another person who chose to live with two roommates across the bridge in Berkeley and takes the Caltrain to work every day.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Is it fair to comp these people differently because they made this cost of living decision? And the answer, of course, is no. We would look at that situation and say, “Absolutely not.” But then you start to get to this world where it’s like, “Well, what if it’s Susie and Bob and Susie has kids, and she’s in the outskirts and Bob’s in the city.” And it changes that narrative quite a bit.
William Tincup: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: And I like to tell people the best place to start is cost of labor. We do look at the surveys. I think there is a balancing act. It is an art and a science. When people… You can’t go all-in on only data, right.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: It’s a statistical model first, to be very clear. And I always have to explain this to people. It is a percentile basis. So there are tales that you can ignore or look at.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: And because it is a statistical model, that’s constantly being rerun. It’s going to move. It’s going to go up and down.
William Tincup: Yeah. But as you said, you start with principles.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yes.
William Tincup: So it’s not random.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yep.
William Tincup: It’s principled. And so you lay down the foundation of something that’s principled, and then you deal with things, ebbing, and flowing, that makes sense. Okay. So what’s the fourth? After workflow, what’s the fourth feature?
Kaitlyn Knopp: Oh, so we actually have… That was only the second. So we have two more.
William Tincup: Oh, my bad.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Another one that we’re launching now is our comp cycle management tool. So we found a lot of success with our offers tool, helping companies reduce… We kind of compressed the amount of disparity in role and pay, which was amazing because that helped towards pay parity.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: We shaved two days off of the average time to engineering offer, which just huge for recruiters.
William Tincup: Oh that’s… Yes. That’s two days they already have another job somewhere else.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Exactly.
William Tincup: So yeah, two days is super, super important.
Kaitlyn Knopp: We just found our median time to approval is an hour and 40 minutes across our customers, which is just unheard of fast.
William Tincup: Oh, that’s great.
Kaitlyn Knopp: But there’s a ton of automations we put into that. And the other thing. We save companies, on average, a hundred K within the first week of launching us just in preventing erroneous pay decisions, putting people in the wrong location, or having the wrong level title, whatever it is. And we want to take those learnings and put it in the comp cycle to make for this more collaborative world where you can both build your model for your complex workforce, as well as deliver it to your managers to let them plan and educate them on how to plan because I think that’s a huge gap in comp, this education component.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: And so that’s-
William Tincup: Especially when you’re doing something that’s principled but flexible.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yes.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Exactly. And you have to train… It’s constant training, and they’re not-
William Tincup: Yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: As much as managers are involved in the day-to-day of their employees, they’re not handing them a paycheck. They’re doing [crosstalk 00:18:18]-
William Tincup: And they can’t keep… And there’s no way they can keep up with what’s going on with comp. I mean, comp people struggle to keep up with-
Kaitlyn Knopp: Oh.
William Tincup: … what’s going on with comp. So they’ve got a day job, so that’s fair. And some of them recruiters. So I mean, it’s fair that comp, this is what… you need the expertise, but you need it in real-time or as close-
Kaitlyn Knopp: Exactly.
William Tincup: … to real-time as possible.
Kaitlyn Knopp: And that’s why we wanted to lean into making that more educational, more collaborative so that we can create a world where we do always come to the right decision.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: And everyone has that level of try transparency to guarantee it. So that’s our third feature in the fourth that we just announced. We’re very excited. You’ve probably seen, William, all the new announcements about states and cities that are requiring salaries to be posted in their jobs.
William Tincup: Yeah. Yeah.
And Google and Indeed, putting a lot of job boards [inaudible 00:19:11] this. But if salary… There’s a difference between salary bands and salary and no salary. They treat the job posting differently, which is fascinating on some levels, of course. But I’ve also seen people kind of gain that by putting 50-
Kaitlyn Knopp: Oh.
William Tincup: … to 120,000. It’s like, “Oh, okay, well, so that’s the game? We’re just [inaudible 00:19:32]”
Kaitlyn Knopp: [inaudible 00:19:32].
William Tincup: Yeah. Yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: These laws are loose at the moment.
William Tincup: Yeah. Yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: When they first had the pay law in California about you had to disclose a reasonable range. The first question everyone had was, “What is being-
William Tincup: Reasonable.
Kaitlyn Knopp: … reasonable?”
William Tincup: Yeah. Define that. Define that for me. My reasonable is not your reasonable. [crosstalk 00:19:52]-
Kaitlyn Knopp: Exactly.
William Tincup: Do you see that more as a compliance or is that furthering the education?
Kaitlyn Knopp: I think it’s furthering education. I also think that the way that we’re looking at our process is we want to just make it easier. I want to walk the walk that I’m talking, right. I’m like, “We’re saying we’re going to have this amazing product, which I do believe we have, to help solve all these comp issues. We should use it ourselves and solve for the same issues.” And we’re a fully remote distributed team. So those pay laws actually impact us. And it’s coming.
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: In the UK, in August 2022, it’s going to be enforced, and we have employees there.
William Tincup: Oh, yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: We [crosstalk 00:20:26]-
William Tincup: And you’re doing all the way down [inaudible 00:20:27] municipal [inaudible 00:20:27] the states. You’ve got Seattle with a minimum wage that’s different from outside of Seattle. So like-
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yes.
William Tincup: “Okay. Be up to date with that. Good luck.”
All right. Let me ask you [crosstalk 00:20:39]-
Kaitlyn Knopp: … so much
William Tincup: … three buy-side questions. One is when you demo Pequity for folks, what’s your favorite part of the demo?
Kaitlyn Knopp: Oh, I have so many favorites. I think-
William Tincup: I know. I know.
Kaitlyn Knopp: … my favorite part is going to have to be when we show the analytics.
William Tincup: Oh, cool.
Kaitlyn Knopp: The amount of valuable data you just get from your own workflows. Seeing how your recruiters are doing. What roles are they struggling on? What roles are going back for multiple versions of an offer because there’s a never-ending negotiation going on? When you go and look at your competing offers, what companies do you go against? What are they offering? And when you look at your employees. Where’s the attrition? Where do we see people who are really far below range, and their comp is speedily increasing, and they’re now 20% below, and they’re a flight risk? That is so valuable to individuals.
And it’s such a sell for having a centralized platform. I think that that’s probably one of my favorite pieces of it because people just light up and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I spend months doing this right now. And it’s me pulling data from my ATS and my HRS,” which we integrate to both. So we have the ATS for, especially the recruiter workbench, the HRS for comp cycle management.
But because we’re pulling both those systems together and displaying it with your workflow on top, you kind of get a heart rate monitor for your compensation programs. It’s like, “This is the heartbeat of the org and how we’re doing when it comes to a comp.” And it’s so much easier to diagnose something when you can keep a finger on the pulse of it.
William Tincup: Yeah. And you could also see that being tied into stay interviews and exit interviews to make sure-
Kaitlyn Knopp: Oh, yeah.
William Tincup: … that you’re validating the heartbeat. Questions because you’ve worked the other side of the table.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Yeah.
William Tincup: Questions that you love hearing from buyers. What should they be asking you about Pequity?
Kaitlyn Knopp: I love when people ask how we help with fair and equal pay. Our vision is equal pay and opportunity for all. I always tell people, “If I’ve learned anything from all these companies that do this process well, it’s that there’s no sexy answer to pay equity. It’s just-
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: … consistency.” We have to compare people to the same metrics, run them through the same process, show the same data.
To your point. Don’t put the negotiation on the candidate. Put the pressure on your own systems and team to flag when, “Hey, this person didn’t negotiate. And look, against the peers, they’re 20% below the peers. Are we okay with that?” And the answer’s probably no, I hope. But that excites me when people ask how we can help with that vision and that mission. And I think that people should ask us about those questions. I also love when people ask, “How do you solve or insert very manual, ridiculous pain points that exist today?”
William Tincup: Right.
Kaitlyn Knopp: There’s so many of those like, “Oh, how do you solve for the fact that I’m running my model in a spreadsheet and then I need to pour it over into my planning tool, and once I-”
William Tincup: A very sophisticated…
Kaitlyn Knopp: Oh.
William Tincup: For comp folks, a very, very sophisticated spreadsheet. I might add.
Kaitlyn Knopp: They are lengthy. I’ve built a few in my time. And I think it’s just so fun to see how excited they get because it’s months that we’re taking off their plate, and it’s not-
William Tincup: Oh, yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: … cheap [inaudible 00:24:01].
William Tincup: Oh, no.
Kaitlyn Knopp: This is like 30 to 40% of the companies spend usually. That’s about how much a payroll will run a company. So to have something that offers more simplicity and gives you that valuable time back to make sure that you’re processing it the right way and that your numbers are accurate. And the budget is in sync. That is just money on the table for these people.
William Tincup: Favorite customer story without naming names, of course.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
William Tincup: Where they’ve innovated, where they’ve done something. Maybe where they were blind, and now they’re not blind. You’re going to have a bunch of these, but just your favorite one.
Kaitlyn Knopp: Oh, man. I mean, I am always just impressed and surprised by how far some companies are willing to go. One company… We have these very strong permissions within Pequity. You can have people come through SSO and Okta, assign them a role level based on their type coming in, or you can override and give them individual access. So I could say, “Will, you’re a technical recruiter. I want to give you access only to ranges for end-product design level one to three in San Francisco. And I only want to show you this portion of the range, right.”
So it’s super, super robust. And they added this company, their entire company, to the platform to see all of the ranges. And that is so cool to me because I think that… I’ve wondered this question, especially with these new salary laws. If you’re publishing your ranges anyways to your posting, your employees are going to want to know it first too.
William Tincup: Yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: So this company’s getting ahead of it by adding all of them into it. And they’re actually letting them collaborate on some of the offers. So that’s offers usually are between recruiter, comp, manager, that’s it. And I think that is the most efficient route. But in this company, they’re having the recruiters actually tag employees in where they’re like, “Hey, you’re closest to this team. We’re thinking of offering this. How do you feel?” And I think it takes out some of that sting where you hire a new hire, and they get more comp, and the person who was on the same team is like, “Wait a second.”
William Tincup: Yeah. Not fair.
Kaitlyn Knopp: “I wasn’t even looped in.” Yeah.
William Tincup: Yeah.
Kaitlyn Knopp: That’s not fair at all. And it’s so cool to see that collaboration because I think that’s the way forward. I think that with technology and all these integrations and collaborative tools, you will be able to loop people in and keep this security and compliance. And I’m just excited to see the company that kind of pushes the edge and has Pequity as their platform to help them do it.
William Tincup: Caitlyn, this was wonderful. I know how busy you are. I appreciate you coming on the Use Case Podcast.
Kaitlyn Knopp: I appreciate you hosting me, Will, and it’s just lovely to meet you. And I love talking about this topic. So thank you for giving me time to air about Pequity.
William Tincup: Absolutely. And thanks for everyone listening to the Use Case Podcast. Until next time.
The Use Case Podcast
Authors
William Tincup
William is the President & Editor-at-Large of RecruitingDaily. At the intersection of HR and technology, he’s a writer, speaker, advisor, consultant, investor, storyteller & teacher. He's been writing about HR and Recruiting related issues for longer than he cares to disclose. William serves on the Board of Advisors / Board of Directors for 20+ HR technology startups. William is a graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a BA in Art History. He also earned an MA in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University.
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