Episode 243 - Salary is one of the most uncomfortable parts of the job search, especially when employers ask for expectations early in the process. In this episode, compensation consultant Matt McFarlane explains how companies think about pay, salary bands, job titles, negotiation, and what experienced professionals need to understand before naming a number.

Episode 343 Transcript: Renata Bernarde with Matt McFarlane
Cleaned transcript, no timestamps

Matt McFarlane:
Tell me a bit about what we want to try and cover today.

Renata Bernarde:
Well, salaries. Salaries would be great.

Matt McFarlane:
Yeah, I can talk about that.

Renata Bernarde:
My audience hates talking about salary, Matt. So I guess if they're listening to a podcast with somebody like you, they might be more inclined to discuss it with recruiters, employers, negotiate, all of that. So I was hoping to talk about salaries. I was also hoping to talk about startups because I don't have much startup material in my archives. I've only interviewed two people who work in startups. We're at 342 episodes, so two is not enough.

Matt McFarlane:
Wow. Gosh, you've been gone for a while. Yeah.

Renata Bernarde:
I feel really bad about this. And frankly I haven't really targeted startups much in terms of it being my client base. So I want to. So let's talk about that and how different it is, to go through a recruitment process with a startup and negotiate salaries and all of that. I think it's very different from what my audience is used to. But basically, professionals hate talking about salaries. They hate it at any stage of the process, but especially in the beginning. I think one of the worst moments when people are applying for jobs is when they have a form and it asks for their salary expectations or current salary range. And many people feel very trapped from that question and they worry that it will price them out or undersell them. But that's where you come in because that's what you do. You help companies design salary bands and pay structures and compensation. So why do employers ask for salary information so early, Matt? Please explain this to us.

Matt McFarlane:
Let me start by saying that I am an advocate of the work that I do to help prevent companies from having to go down that path. But I think the reason they do it is because they don't know. They don't know themselves a lot of the time what the right salary is for a role. And often they're looking for signal from the market as well to understand, what is it going to cost me to be able to bring this role in? I know on face value it can seem this could be a knockout question. And yeah, this is part of the issue is that there are going to be companies that do have an idea of what their salary is for a role and they'll still ask the question and they will use it as a way of indicating whether or not someone is priced too highly or potentially capture the upside if somebody is not aware of their own value or their own worth for a role. But it's really inconsistent. And so it's yeah, it's one of those things that I'm a big advocate of the work that I do and helping companies build their compensation practices so they can be a lot more clear and ideally upfront about what the compensation for a role is. Anyone who's followed me on LinkedIn for half a second knows how big of an advocate I am for pay transparency. But I agree with you it's a really poor way to start a potential employment relationship is by having this kind of umming and ahhing moment of, am I undervaluing myself? Am I potentially overvaluing myself and risking losing a role that would otherwise be great and I might have been happy to do for a little bit more cheaply and it all just feeds into this kind of uncertainty which is really what I'm trying to eliminate with the work that I do. I'm really eager for pay transparency to be at a point where people can look at a role, understand what's involved in it, understand what the value for the role is and make a really fully informed decision around what it is. It's a journey that we're all on, various countries around the world, which I'm sure we'll dive into in a little bit more detail. But things are moving in the right direction, even if, it is still a widespread practice.

Renata Bernarde:
Matt, are you saying that you would normally advise, recommend your clients, the employers, not to have that question in their application forms?

Matt McFarlane:
It's a tricky one, right? I don't necessarily think that we shouldn't have the conversation. The thing that's important about asking that question and having that conversation throughout the employment journey is that often companies are basing what they value a role for on a salary survey. So we're speaking to HR professionals and career professionals. I'm sure we've heard of this concept of benchmark data and things like that. That tends to be the main kind of source of information for companies when they're determining what a role is worth. Now, the challenge with that approach is that this information comes from companies that might have been six, maybe 12 months ago sometimes. There are like some providers that are doing more frequent updates, but you're looking at data for people that have been either doing the role for a while or was reported a while ago when actually the market for a role may be very different. And so part of the challenge in doing this kind of elegantly is asking the question in a way where you're not necessarily disqualifying people and you're putting your foot out there first and saying, Hey, here's where we think the role is valued. And trying to trying to kind of keep an idea of where the market is for this kind of role, if that makes sense. So, a lot of companies are looking at this data that's kind of retrospective. It tells you what the salary for a role was, six or twelve months ago. The market tells you what the value for a role is today. And so you want to be able to keep an eye on both of those things, but of course not do it in a way where you're blindly asking for someone's salary expectations and kind of not really sure what to do with it.

Renata Bernarde:
If a candidate is faced with that question, which happens all the time when applying for a role, is there a smart way to answer that? From a recruiter's perspective, you have the recruiter's perspective. I want to know if there is a way that my client, my audience here on the podcast can answer this and not put themselves in a difficult situation.

Matt McFarlane:
Yeah, it is tricky, and I think it really just depends on the circumstances as well and the individual and maybe the kind of role. I think I wouldn't be lying to say that we're in an interesting space from an employment market at the moment. I think there are a certain subset of roles that are very highly sought-after. So I work in the technology space. I see this come up a lot with anything to do with AI. Naturally, it is a very hot topic at the moment. And so often there seems to be a lot of demand for those types of skill sets. And I think there's more of an ability and more freedom for you to kind of put whatever number you want and not necessarily raise concerns or be a disqualifier. From the get-go. Whereas I think where the opposite is the case and where maybe you've got a lot of people applying for an individual role so a really high supply of talent it can be very easy for companies to resort to the salary question as a knockout question which can then be where the challenge is. I think for me the advice that I would give to people is know what it is that your threshold is for a salary and what your expectations are and really you have to play within that. I think part of the challenge around it is that people go, do I put in what my current salary is, do I give myself a little bit of a pay increase or you need to work out what that number is for yourself and there is a range of different resources. I know, as a compensation professional I hate to say ChatGPT but it is a way for you to surface insights in the absence of any other meaningful data around what it is that your role might be worth, and I think you need to agree whether or not that'something that you're looking for in that next opportunity, or if you could go, your expectations are a bit higher or they're a bit lower. I think be prepared to put that forward and be comfortable with the fact that if a company does disqualify you because the salary that you've put in there is too high, then they weren't the right company for you anyway. And I think it's just one of those things that you just need to keep evaluating, right? If you keep finding that you're getting knocked back and the reason is salary, if the company is prepared to share that, then that's where you need to, I guess, ask the question, are my expectations too high? Do I need to kind of revise what I'm looking for here?

Renata Bernarde:
That's a good point. In fact, I think it would be great for us to now educate my audience on how companies come up with salaries and packages. When a company decides that it's time to create a new role or go to market for an existing role, how do they decide what the package should be?

Matt McFarlane:
It's a good question. So ordinarily, they will sit down and they'll do a bit of a intake or they'll think deeply about what the role is that they're trying to hire for. So the set of skills, the scope, the area of responsibility, the kind of impact they're expecting it to have across the organization, they should really think about that deeply and define that really well before looking at what I mentioned earlier, the compensation data set that they use. So ordinarily they'll go, okay, let's just say we're looking for an HR manager. We understand it's going to have these skills, this set of responsibilities. And then what we're going to do is we're going to look at the compensation data set for what's called a job family, so essentially a descriptor for the kind of role that we're looking for. They'll look for the one that has the closest match, the kind of most fully describes that type of skill set or that kind of function. So if it's an HR manager, it might just be something as simple as the human resources function. And then the next step is really kind of sizing the role. So this is where we go, okay, are we looking at a relatively junior role? Are we looking at a mid-level role or a more senior role? Is it a manager? Maybe all of these sorts of things help quantify the size of the role that we're looking for. And this basically just helps us triangulate on the kind of data that they're going to be reporting on to then form their salary benchmark. From there, they're going to think about things what kind of how competitive do we want to be in this market? Do we think that 50th percentile is enough for us to find someone who's going to be really great at this role? It's going to be competitive enough for us to hire this person. Or do we think actually this is a really sought after role or we have very high expectations of this person and actually we want to look at targeting something a little bit more competitive. Maybe we want to go 75th percentile. And this just means, essentially where in the market are we paying? Choosing the 50th percentile we're choosing a salary that is fifty is larger than 50 percent of the numbers that have been reported in the sal in the salary survey essentially and all of this is then done to then go okay well if we're targeting 50th percentile as an example then they may go okay well we're going to turn that into a salary band so they'll add a range above and below that 50th percentile and then they'll they should if they're doing this effectively they should think about how they use that salary range as well so typically In my experience, the bottom half of the salary range is used for where we're introducing people into a role or where people might have been promoted from a more junior role. And they're starting to hit their stride within the in the role before moving into the top half of the salary range, which is more where their progression is, where we expect them to spend most of their career being through performance increases or progression increases and things like that. But that in a very, very simple nutshell is kind of how a company will come up with a salary. In terms of packages, I guess things that come to mind for me when I think of the total reward package, there's all sorts of things. There's in the space that I work, often things like equity will come into play. So this is the either actual shares or the opportunity to buy shares within a company at a discount, which is the most common one that I see. And then it can be, the sky's the limit really in terms of opportunity. Obviously, in places the U.S., health care is a very common thing. Here in Australia, we have superannuation and annual leave. In Australia that's mandated in the UK and the U.S. It can be optional. So this often is what helps kind of give context to what a package is defined as is what's the mandatory expectations within the market, what are maybe the norms, or what would be considered competitive to be able to employ people there. So in the in the U.S., health insurance isn't mandated, but if you didn't offer it, you'd probably really struggle to hire people. And then the third. Sort of lens people think to is like okay well what's what'something that's like relevant to our culture or something that helps us really attract the kind of people and this might be your things additional leave or a learning and development stipend or all of those sorts of things and really all of this should be done and built and defined with your people, ideally. So companies should really be thinking about this entire process with a view to who are we trying to attract and retain as an organization and who do we ensure we want to motivate and develop and see have long, happy careers. Ideally that's being done in dialogue with employees as well.

Renata Bernarde:
Matt, when employees and candidates look at bands and when they're looking for work, they are usually thinking, okay, so this goes from 120 to 140, I'm aiming at 140, I will apply. But it's

Matt McFarlane:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Renata Bernarde:
is it safe to say it's rarely the case that they will be hired at the top of the band? Or are they is that true?

Matt McFarlane:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, again, this really comes down to like how a company has defined the salary ranges. So if the dialogue is able to be had, it's always worth asking, why would someone be paid 120 in this role versus 140? What's something that differentiates that? And a good company that'sat down and is using these salary ranges effectively should have really, clearly defined why someone would be at that level within the range. Some of the common reasons that I expect companies would have around where someone would sit within the range. So the first one is what I mentioned where, maybe the bottom half, so 120 to 130 is being used for that introductory where people are kind of onboarding, they're building context, they're building an understanding of their role and the relationships that across the organization, and then they progress into the top half. Others may have different things. It may be a purely tenure-based thing. It may be something that is tied to skills or qualifications. So it really passes to have for conversation because there's no two companies that are the same when it comes to this. And often they can have different reasons for why someone would sit at a certain range within the range. There's also plenty of companies that don't define this. And so it's always worth kind of making your case, for lack of a better word, if your expectations are around 140 and they're saying that the range can be 140. But I think what then comes with that question is what happens next? What happens at the next compensation review? Are those bands static? Is there still a way to move beyond the band? Or, what kind of happens there I think is the important next question. Because you may find that actually you are able to secure that offer at 140 at the top end of the range, but then you find that the company might, what they call, redline you or red box you or red circle you. There's several different names, but essentially it may be the case that actually your ability to progress your salary is then essentially frozen because the range has an upper limit. And then the only way to grow your salary might be through a promotion or a internal movement or something like that. So it's always worth thinking through and asking the question if you can have that conversation. Not only A, why what would I need to do to get to the top of the range and be offered there, but then what happens next? What happens in a year's time? What, how do I grow my salary From there?

Renata Bernarde:
Yeah, yeah. I worked in higher education for many years, so the bands are super strict over there and it makes it really hard for us to have that mobility. But I wavery lucky I moved up and when I was in a position of hiring as well, I was allowed to top up, because if you were ha trying to hire people from specific industries to come in and work in higher ed and their industry pays better than higher education, then there was an allowance that I could use to top it up. You can ask for that. So there are, we need to become better at negotiation. We're going to get there. I want to ask you about that. How do we get there? But another thing that I think confuses people at that early stage of job applications is job titles, right? Job titles can get people really confused, and it can also affect their ego and status. If they have been a director and then the next job title is a senior manager. The 'head of' title is something people hardly ever understand. So the other thing is, working with clients, I often see people unwilling to apply for a job because of the job title, even if the job is well paid. They don't want to have a manager job title anymore if they've upgraded to a director at their previous employment. How would you explain job titles and choice of job titles for my audience?

Matt McFarlane:
Yeah, it absolutely can be tricky. And if I go back to my earlier point around like how companies should be coming up with a salary range for a job, most companies, unfortunately, will just go with, a job title. So if we use the HR manager example that I gave before, they'll go, Okay, let's look at, a salary data set and it might say HR manager, but actually it's an HR manager for a ten thousand person company versus you who might be in a one hundred person company. We're talking about drastically different kinds of environments, very different ability to afford that skill set with a large conglomerate type of company versus a small, maybe a mom-and-pop company. All of these sorts of things are a kind of a lens with which to view what is arguably a similar set of skills. So it can be a really tricky thing. It'something that I absolutely see trips up companies in terms of how they think about it. But yeah, it's a messy thing, right? And I think one of the things that I would say I see happen most commonly in the kinds of organizations that I work with. Is that title can be used as a form of currency because, as you mentioned, it has a value to people. Being able to accept a role as a VP or a director when you're a senior manager or a manager or something like that, there'something very compelling because, again, it'something that is it's a label that we apply to ourselves. It's a it gives us a sense of hierarchy, it gives us a sense of place in the world. When you're having the barbecue on the weekend and you get to say I'm the VP of HR instead of the HR manager, people look at that and go, okay, yeah, it's a it's a really senior title. And so I think all of that gets caught up in this process. How do I encourage people to think about it? Again, you've got to think about what's important to you. I can reflect on a couple of times where I've left a role that had a more senior title to go to a company that was different, but to a more junior sounding title in terms of the hierarchy. And that was a really conscious decision. Sometimes that came with a higher pay. Despite the lower, the more junior sounding title, sometimes I actually I took either a step sideways or a step backwards because of the career opportunity that it gave me. It might have been that in the company that I was in, I was really at the max of my like career progression there and I didn't see a path forward. And so I took a step backwards or I took a step sideways into another company that offered much more career progression. And I think much the salary thing, you really have to sit down and think deeply around what's what's Important for you, what you're looking for in that next move? Are you just making a move for the sake of a move? Are you looking what ultimately what are your goals around the next role that you're pursuing? And I think when it comes to title, you have to unless it is something that you're really hung up on, you kind of have to be egoless about it, you have to think in the context of  well, am I getting the sort of salary that I'm looking for? And it's helping me, achieve the goals that I have for my life, or allow me to live the lifestyle. That I want to live or is it going to give me something that gets me on the path to getting there faster than where I am at the moment? So these are all the things that I would encourage someone to weigh up when they're looking at that. It's never just the salary, it's never just the job title, it's that and the opportunity and all those things mixed together.

Renata Bernarde:
Matt, do you think it goes both ways? Do you think employers when they're looking at candidates and the candidates have very fancy titles, does it also, affect their biases towards the candidate for and against? I'm thinking of somebody who comes from a smaller startup, they're a COO there, but their salary is  170K. There, and then they're applying for a management role in a larger organization, an operational role. For example, and the similar salaries, would that be a problem?

Matt McFarlane:
It depends. If the candidate's looking for something more senior. Again I work in startups, I see this happen all the time. Often a startup isn't able to necessarily compete on salary. And so they go, hey, we're going to give you a really senior-sounding title, even though you work in a company with 50 people, and we're going to call you a COO as an example. And again, using that, the previous example from before, a COO at a company of 50 people is not going to be doing the same kind of work as a COO at a company of 10,000. So this is often the complexity of what I'm coming into with the companies that I do work with: is that you've got someone who's maybe not paying paid a COO and likely isn't doing the kind of calibre of work of a COO, but they've managed to negotiate that title as a way for the company to bring them in. And in many ways, I see that as being a valid way to solve a problem, which is that you have a need for a skill set, and although it does it does cause issues down the line, it's a way for you to kind of bring someone in and help you kind of solve for that problem without having to stump up more cash, which you may not be. Able to do at a point where you don't actually have that or you don't want to you don't want to spend too much of your runway or something like that. So it is definitely something that I see happen a lot. And I think but it does naturally create the issue later on though when you start to introduce some structure into organizations where if I'm going to go and benchmark a your role I'm going to look at your title but I'm also going to look at what it is that you're doing from a work perspective. And when I see that actually that work doesn't match up with what a COO is called this is where we start to have Some of the difficult conversations around, hey, why isn't the salary a COO salary, or why is it that I'm called a COO, but actually my role more closely resembles a director of operations or something like that. So this is where this is where some of the kind of untangling tends to happen for organizations that are going through that growth journey. But this is absolutely, compensation gets described as an art and a science. This is very much part of the art side of things, is how we think about roles, what we call them, how we define them, all those sorts of things can unfortunately often be very like open to wide interpretation.

Renata Bernarde:
Yeah, I got it. It's interesting and I really want to now talk about startups because that's the bulk of your clients. I have only I told you before I only have two episodes that focus on startups. One was with Emily Zhang, who at the time was CPO of MONUVA, and the other one was with the co-founder of Mindset Health, Alex Nomidis. And I'm glad that you're here today because we desperately need more people to talk about startups here on this podcast. If you're listening, I'll put the link, I'll put the link below to those other two episodes because they're really great. But there's such a big difference between startup versus established organizations. I see that as a coach working with my clients when they're going through a process with a startup, even if it's not a real startup anymore, they've sort of grown and matured. The recruitment process is still very different. Maybe because they're not working with you, Matt, but I find that they're very convoluted and very I think it's probably because my clients are senior professionals. So when they're going into a startup, it's usually a new role, right? It's a and that the development of that role takes time to mature, but also it'such a big investment if you're hiring somebody to, to work at the C level or very strategic level within an organization. So I find that it can be, a long process at times, convoluted, a lot of negotiations, a lot of presentations and conversations and so forth. So is that why your work is needed? Tell me about the difference that my clients can expect working with startups.

Matt McFarlane:
Yeah, and I guess I'll I'll caveat this by saying that I don't do a lot of recruiting myself, but certainly I see it from inside when I'm working with the talent acquisition team or the HR team or something like that. I think look one of the things that I love about startups and I think contributes to some of this challenge is that they are in this really greenfield environment. They're trying to solve a problem that is not being solved by anyone else and they're trying to come up with a product that is going to help solve it or a service that's going to help solve it. But often depending on the size and the stage of the organization they haven't done it. So they haven't found what we call product-market fit. So there's a lot of trial and error, there's a lot of research and development, there's a lot of  how do we make this thing work effectively? And I think it's that kind of mindset and the sort of I guess the instability and the fluidity of the organization to try and find a scalable solution to the problem that it'solving that I think colors a lot of other experiences the recruiting process for example. So contrast that with a company that makes a widget and they've been making a widget for 50 years. All they really need to do is like make it more efficiently, or they're kind of finding other ways to improve how they build that widget or build the widget better or something like that. Whereas with these startups, they're just trying to work out what the widget is, what's the thing that we're actually trying to build and sell to people. And so often that hasn't been defined very well. And as they as they try something and it's either successful or it's not, they're often pivoting throughout the process. And if you can imagine, that therefore means that the types of skills that they need as an organization are likely to be very different. And so how I often see this translate to the recruiting process is that it's often more about the kind of person from a culture and from a behaviors perspective than it is necessarily from a skills perspective. And I think now more than ever with AI, that is more relevant because, I can go online and I can download a skill with respect to something like marketing. And my background is not marketing. I've never had experience in marketing. I've, I've worked it all out on my own, but now I can kind of have a little bit of capability in marketing more than what I used to have because there's all of these skills that are sort of widely available. So suffice to say, startups are often not very good at defining what they're looking for. And I think this can feed into some of the job titling issues that we talked about earlier. And they are also kind of looking for someone who is able to come into an environment where things aren't very well defined, they're a little ambiguous, we're kind of working it out as we go along, and they're looking for someone who's going to have the ability to sort of process that and the agency to actually make decisions and build in a direction and pivot if needed, rather than a sort of a templated role that maybe a bigger company might be looking for. So I think that feeds into a lot of it. And look, some of the things that I see on my end, some of the symptoms that I see is that I might benchmark a role for a client that I'm working with, thinking that it's a level three or a level four. Let's say it's a manager role. And suddenly how I see it manifest is that a hiring manager is looking at a short list and suddenly, someone with a director title catches their eye or someone with a CV that's more experienced and the scope of what we were looking for catches their eye. And this is where often there can be a bit of backwards and forwards on my side to go, okay, well you're now looking for a different role, so we need to look at a different salary. But this gives you the context of how fluid it can be with respect to hiring within startups. So it is a very different environment, I think, to a more structured corporate environment by comparison.

Renata Bernarde:
I have so many case studies that I could talk about, but I think the funniest one was when this client of mine was approached by a startup. And they sent him a position description and he sent it to me and he said, I don't think they want me. This position description is really not for me. And I said, I think you're right. I think that's a completely different type of professional. And he went back to them and said, Look, I'm sorry, but I actually don't do any of these things. And they said, no, what we want is you. Can you write the position description for us?

Matt McFarlane:
Here's the draft. I want you to revise it to fit what you do.

Renata Bernarde:
He's still there. It's been a few years and it worked out well for him. But it goes to show that, I think there's this sort of flexibility in the environment. This is often working with a founder as well and somebody in sometimes medtech or biotech or fintech. And they don't necessarily have that. When I worked at Monash University I was a director in the enterprise portfolio and some of the work that we used to do was to help these amazing researchers that were lab-based researchers who had spent twenty years trying to find a cure for cancer, suddenly they find a cure for cancer and we need to springboard them into a startup that's created within the organization and it needs to go out and find funding and whatnot, and they have no clue. Suddenly

Matt McFarlane:
Very different role.

Renata Bernarde:
It's very common for people to be an inventor, right? And a researcher, and suddenly you are the CEO and you have to hire people and you have to go out and talk to investors. So we shouldn't expect them to have it all together, right?

Matt McFarlane:
And often they're still defining what their recruiting process looks like. There might be a talent acquisition specialist or something, but they've often, got such a high load in terms of how many roles they're trying to fill that they're not able to build a really robust process at the same time. Often they can run a good one, but yeah, it can be really tricky. And I think, any good startup also has a lot of recruiting being done by the founder. They, they should be constantly on the lookout for great talent. And these people often haven't come from structured recruitment environments themselves, right? They might be a former engineer who's now come up with a solution for something. They're looking for someone with whatever they define as that spark, that little bit of something that's going to help them handle the ambiguity and kind of come up with a solution or a product or a service or whatever it is for the company. But often that doesn't look a very simple, phone screen, interview one, behavioral interview, CEO interview. It doesn't look as structured as that. And so it can come off, I think it shows up in the recruitment process from a candidate perspective as being I don't know where I stand, I don't know what you're actually wanting from me from a role perspective. It can be a bit of a lack of clarity and a bit of uncertainty of whether or not there's a fit there as well because they're feeling them out rather than going through a structured process.

Renata Bernarde:
Okay. That's good, Matt. Matt, moving on to the tail end of the process, right? So we had an expert come to the podcast many episodes ago, Brandon Bramley. I'll put the link below if people are interested. And his whole thesis was that we need to be better at negotiating, right? People that are desperate for a job are usually not very good at negotiating, or sometimes they might sort of be pushing too hard. So from your perspective, is that built into the recipe of the recruitment process? Do employers expect that the top candidate will try to negotiate?

Matt McFarlane:
Yeah, again it's really a yes-and-no thing. I think there are so many things that factor into it. So one, it depends on the geography. So again, if you're in the U.S., there is a very strong negotiation culture there. It's very common for someone to get to the offer stage and to have the conversation around, hey, this is what my expectations are. There, I often I often also tend to see them be more comfortable with different aspects of the package. Whereas I would say in Australia, often if we are going to negotiate, it's only going to be on base salary, except for maybe executive roles they're a little different. We often don't think about things like more leave or health insurance or different equity or some of those sorts of things. I think it's changing a little bit. In the tech industry, it's probably a little a little different again. But yeah, I think I would characterize it by saying,  I wish we didn't have to be good negotiators, but I think we do, right? My dream would be for companies to be really clear on the kind of person that they're hiring for, really clear on what they want to offer for that role, and for people to be clear on that upfront and to be commencing the recruiting process, already having kind of gotten the negotiation out of the way because you go, okay, the role's offering 150, I'm looking for 150. Perfect. I'm going to apply for it. You've kind of already had the conversation. You're already comfortable with where the offer's likely to come out to. Now, again, I work with companies that often haven't gone through that structure and that process, which I think means that yes, we need to be thinking about as candidates how it is we can negotiate for ourselves when we do reach the tail end of the process, because ultimately you want to ensure that you're getting something that is going to be effective for yourself. And finding a way to make sure that it's going to be compatible with what the organization's looking for as well. And often they don't really know that, they're just looking for a strong skill set. And so this is where I think it feeds into your question around  what when do we know if we're pushing too hard versus not enough and things like that. I think moving to that piece, it really again comes back to  what stage of the process are you at? Do you know for certain that you're the preferred candidate and others are sort of falling behind, what are the things that you can think about from a leverage perspective that are going to help your cause. I think if you're if you're going to work for Woolworths or Coles or something, one of the supermarkets and you're one of 50 people they're hiring to work at the registers, you're probably not going to be in a great position to negotiate what it is that you're looking for. Versus if you are someone who is in a highly sought-after role or skill set or you bring something that this organization desperately needs, that's where the supply and demand ratio of the equation tends to bend in your favor. And that's where you can think a little more deeply about what you're looking for. So I think you need to weigh up where you sort of sit with respect to that, what sort of levers you have. And then I think it goes back to again, what are your goals? If you're looking for a certain kind of salary and this company isn't able to hit it, what are some other things that you can consider and have a conversation with that would help offset you not having the same kind of salary that you're looking for? So again, I mentioned, in Australia, in the context here, we can be good at negotiating salary, but often we can be very poor about considering other things. When I say other things, it could be more leave, it could be the health insurance piece that I mentioned, it could be, the kind of technology that you're using at work. I know for me, it's like I like using a Mac if you're coming into an environment where you don't have as nice a computer or something like that, all of those sorts of things can be on the table. And I think that's where it's important for you to sit down and go again, what am I looking for from that next role? What are the things that are going to make me enjoy where I'm working better? All of these bits and pieces. And I think bring those pieces to the table and they are cards to play when you're having this negotiation conversation.

Renata Bernarde:
Matt, one of the things that I've been helping a few clients with for the past couple of years is making the contract flexible so that they can work on a side hustle. And that has been something I negotiated for myself in the past. And now I see some people interested in that. I've always negotiated extra leave. I don't think people realize that is possible. And because I have family overseas, extra leave has always been important to me. And even way before people thought about working from home, I had to because I have health issues, I've always negotiated working from home. Now it'standard, but back then it wasn't. So all of these things can be so beneficial, above and beyond salary. So thank you for bringing all of that up. Talking about people that you work with, who are your clients, and why would people work with your company?

Matt McFarlane:
I help companies build compensation practices. The kinds of companies that I work with are generally in the sort of 100 to 500 headcount size, roughly. So they've kind of like starting to step out of startups really into more of a scale-up sort of stage. And they are generally, I would say like Australian-based but with a global footprint, most of them, and then they are generally in the technology industry. So they're coming out with some kind of a hardware or software solution for the kind of problem that you're trying to solve. And yeah, that's that'sort of who I find myself most closely working with.

Renata Bernarde:
And do they need your help because they're growing?

Matt McFarlane:
Yeah, ordinarily, especially as you start to hit the 100 headcount size, I think they start to feel the pain of having the lack of structure when it comes to their compensation practices. So often this can manifest in a number of different ways. When it comes to the recruiting side of things, it can be thinking about how we're forecasting for the kind of roles that we're hiring for. So some of these companies may have raised a round of investment. They're about to go on a hiring spree, but they haven't been able to go actually, do we know what these roles even demand in the market? How do we actually think about how we're forecasting for that? Working with the finance team and actually making sure that we're budgeting for it and all these sorts of bits and pieces. All the way through to everything we've touched on today. How are we handling the recruitment process, how are we ensuring that we're finding the kind of people that we're looking for, we're able to have those conversations with respect to salary. And then all the way through the life cycle as well. So, how we think about doing our compensation reviews, what someone might be earning when they're being promoted, pay equity is of course a big thing as well. Here in Australia it was only a couple of years ago that we banned pay secrecy. So even despite that, people were talking about what they were earning with each other anyway. So pay is no longer this kind of taboo topic, and it's only entering the mainstay of conversation increasingly, especially as newer generations into the workforce. And so that just continues to amp up the pressure on companies and HR teams in particular to be able to explain their pay practices. If you can't articulate why a role is worth what it's worth in the eyes of the company, then people will just assume that. You're underpaying them or that you're not paying them fairly. And then unfortunately that's just the default stance that most people tend to have with respect to pay. They just go, I hear so much about, in the news people being underpaid or, all of these sorts of things happening. And so people the burden of proof is really on companies to be able to say, hey, here's where we pay in the market, here's why we choose to pay it, here's how that translates to a salary range, here's how it translates to where you sit in the salary range. And if you want to, increase that salary, here's how you can be promoted or progressed or move within that framework. That's increasingly the expectation that employees have of their employers.

Renata Bernarde:
And this is the second year you're running the Startup People Summit. Why is it necessary to have a Startup People Summit? Who attends?

Matt McFarlane:
It's a good question. I started this because when I was in HR roles, I kept looking around at the kind of conferences that were available within the ANZ region and often just finding that it wasn't really a place for the startups and the scale-ups that I was working in and the kind of communities that I was looking to get involved in. I think there were places for the more enterprise size of organizations, but I just increasingly felt that they were dealing with very different kinds of problems. I think, we've covered a lot of the context in this conversation. Startups are often building something from scratch when you're in the people team, and then you're probably building it again in 12 months' time because the company has changed so much. So Startup People Summit was built to create a space to spotlight some of the incredible things that the startups and scale-ups are doing in our region when it comes to building their people practices and also to start to create a bit of a community. I know it can be a really isolating role when you're in a HR role, either as standalone or even when you're leading a team, and being able to have peers that are going through some of the challenges. Those challenges you're going through can be really helpful to navigating some of the challenges that you're overcoming within the organization. It can prevent you from reinventing the wheel or just, sometimes having a nice shoulder to cry on or have a wine with as you talk about some of the things you're dealing with. So that's what it's there to solve. And yeah, looking forward to running our second event this year.

Renata Bernarde:
I'm very excited. The lineup is incredible. I'll put a link below if anybody wants to sign up. You've been so busy. So you finding the time to come and talk to us is awesome. Thank you so much. Is there anything that we forgot to talk about?

Matt McFarlane:
The topic goes so deep. No, I think we've hit the main ones. Yeah, I think I'll just encourage. I'm always on LinkedIn, so if anyone wants to talk about this sort of stuff, just reach out. I'm pretty responsive via LinkedIn messages and things like that. But no, it's been a great conversation. I appreciate you having me on.

Renata Bernarde:
Thank you. Well that's how I found you. I found you because you're great on LinkedIn. So everybody follow Matt on LinkedIn. He is incredible. And Matt, thanks again for joining me. There you go. All right.