Introducing Compa Index
Offers-based, real-time market data, built for enterprise
For the past few months, I have been partnering closely with compensation leaders from dozens of innovative technology companies to reimagine market data for fast-changing markets.
Today, I am proud to officially launch our new product, Compa Index, the first real-time market data platform based on offers and built for the enterprise.
I want take a break from my usual newsletter this week to share why comp leaders at companies like NVIDIA, Autodesk, Block, and DoorDash seek real-time market data, and why I believe offers prove an extraordinarily powerful solution.
Why real-time market data
Imagine you are responsible for buying over $1 billion in stock, but using only last year’s prices.
For the past two years, comp teams have faced that dilemma as multiple, simultaneous shocks drove unprecedented volatility in talent markets - from remote work and the great resignation, to inflation, pay transparency, and layoffs. In a fast-changing world, traditional data sources fall far behind, leaving comp teams flying blind.
Why does it matter?
When the economy speeds up, you underpay, impacting competitiveness. When the economy slows, you overpay, potentially by tens of millions. Either way, lagging pay strategies exacerbate pay inequities. Nobody wins.
Comp teams need fresh, relevant market data to enable the level of precision, efficiency, and accountability that matches the times. And they still need the reliability and structure provided by surveys.
Real-time and trustworthy… can you have your cake and eat it too?
Why offers
We founded Compa on the fundamental idea that offers are the cause of and solution to all pay problems.
Offers are largely overlooked, both for their downstream pay impact and for their potential as a source of market data.
Economically speaking, the offer is pure, unfiltered market signal. It is literally the interface between the enterprise and the talent marketplace - the bid/ask transaction that reveals price. In aggregate, accepted and rejected offers represent prevailing market rates.
Offers also encode valuable metadata about market activity like offer volumes, acceptance rates, and time to fill. Similar to the housing market, we can use these insights to estimate (and even predict) market trends. Declining volumes, rising acceptance rates – prices will likely fall.
What about traditional employee-based data from surveys?
Employee pay fundamentally lags the market because most organizations update pay only twice per year at most. And unlike offers, it’s a function of many non-market-based factors like performance, budget, and manager discretion.
Offers, however, are fundamentally real-time because they are in-time market transactions. They help us see what the market is doing today, and where it might go next.
Employee-based market data is the norm, but offers get overlooked by comp teams.
They sit in the talent acquisition team’s system of record, the applicant tracking system (ATS), separate from employee data. The data is difficult to extract and analysis requires manual work.
Compa Index solves this problem and connects data into our network, producing the first offers-based market data platform for enterprise compensation teams.
How it works
Compa Index aggregates offer data across our customer network in a give-to-get model.
By connecting to your applicant tracking system (ATS), verified accepted and rejected offer data contributes automatically – no manual submission required. Your comp team completes a brief questionnaire to help us structure and match your pay elements, jobs and levels so data is apples-to-apples.
Similar to surveys, market data in Compa Index is aggregated and verified. No sharing individual offers and no crowdsourced data. We carefully design privacy in collaboration with customers to earn trust from the most secure enterprise comp teams in the world.
Once live, you get instant access to real-time, global market data exclusively available to participating companies. You also get automated real-time reporting on your internal offers – no more manual data cleaning.
The onboarding process can take as little as one week – that’s it. I’m proud of the technology our team has built to make this possible.
The 2023 market crash… in real-time
When comp leaders see Compa Index for the first time, they almost can’t believe it. The market is moving shockingly fast.
For example, look at senior software engineer compensation:
First-year total comp is down 13% year-to-date; in the last 12 months it’s down 45%
New hire grant values declined steeply, down 57% since this time last year
Signing bonus prevalence dropped from 71% of offers to 22%
Offer acceptance rates rose by 11 percentage points, suggesting the market hasn’t hit bottom yet
These market signals mean that if you haven’t adjusted your guidelines because you rely on lagged data, you could be overspending by tens of millions.
We are in a rapidly changing market, and for the first time ever, you can see it in real-time with Compa Index.
Join our fast-growing community
Since privately releasing Compa Index to our 10 design partners back in March, the response has been amazing. Comp leaders at companies like NVIDIA, Vimeo, and Instacart instantly grasped the potential of offers-based market data – word spread quickly.
Today we publicly launch Compa Index with dozens of participating companies representing over 50,000 offers in tech industries including fintech, semiconductor, aerospace, SaaS, gaming, security, social, AI/data, e-commerce, and cloud.
Compa Index is available exclusively for compensation teams at enterprise technology companies.
If you are curious about how it works, I encourage you to request a demo with our team.
And as a new market data product, coordination is everything; your participation will encourage more of your peers to join as well.
Lastly, a note of thanks
As a former comp leader, I am blown away by what is possible when you use offers to study market trends in real-time.
As a startup founder, I am even more impressed – and humbled – by the extraordinary contributions and creativity I see every day, both from our team and our customers.
With your support, we are proud to introduce real-time market data for the enterprise with Compa Index, furthering our mission to make compensation fair and competitive for everyone.
Thank you.
Cheers, Charlie
Peer Group is a newsletter for comp leaders navigating the new era of pay transparency! If you want to share my newsletter, you can forward this email to your colleagues and fellow comp leaders.
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