Building Strong Relationships Between Total Rewards & Recruiting

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Welcome to Aeqium's Compensation Playbook series! 🎙️Today’s episode features a conversation with Joe Bast, VP of People at Crisp. Joe brings over a decade of experience leading HR teams and offers practical strategies for fostering collaboration between rewards leaders and talent acquisition teams.

This episode covers:

- Aligning rewards and recruiting to avoid hiring mismatches

- Streamlining role prioritization between teams

- Using regular feedback sessions to keep teams aligned

- Leveraging data from offer declines and acceptances

- Strengthening team relationships for better communication

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Transcript:

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Peter McKee: Welcome to Aeqium's Compensation Playbook series. We're really excited to talk with experts in the total rewards space about their experiences, best practices, trends that they're seeing, and really just get into some hands-on strategies for managing compensation.

Today, we have Joe Bast, Vice President of People at Crisp, and someone that I and the whole Aeqium team have been really excited to work with over the last year or so. And we're going to be talking about how rewards leaders can do a better job working and building their working relationships with their partners in talent acquisition.

So first of all, thank you, Joe, so much for joining.

Joe Bast: Happy to be here, Peter. Thanks for the invite.

Peter McKee: Of course. Really excited about this topic and to hear what you have to say about it. So let's go ahead and get right in. I figure we just kind of start with a little bit of overview of sort of your experiences in this area. We'd love to hear about what experiences stand out for you in getting talent acquisition and rewards teams working together and supporting each other.

Joe Bast: Yeah, so the last phase of my career, the most recent phase for the last thirteen years, I've been leading startup HR at a variety of size and stage companies. And so they've been as small as a Series A company where we started with thirty people, and I've had exits as big as eleven hundred people when we were Series D.

And one of the things that I've noticed about this particular— as companies get bigger and you get more HR specialties happening, which is great for the expertise and what we're doing, but it gets harder to collaborate. And so I'll have different stories for you from different phases of my career.

But a lot of what we have to do with compensation has to happen before we actually engage talent acquisition. And then it has to be dynamic while talent acquisition is going on, especially in a hot talent market.

And so again, it gets harder as you get bigger, but that doesn't actually, it doesn't prevent you from having to do the hard work first.

Peter McKee: That resonates a lot. Definitely want to be prepared before you start running into the tricky situations. And I guess like on that point, maybe so that we have an idea of kind of what to look out for, what are some instances that you can share or just even what are the signs that comp and talent acquisition are getting misaligned?

Joe Bast: Oh, there's lots of them. Maybe not in this question, but another one I want to back up and talk about the role that compensation has to play even before we start recruiting.

But some of the misalignment comes from— talent acquisition is really fast. And it's really fast because we have demands. The business needs someone. The founders need someone. And when things get fast, sometimes communication breaks down. And sometimes even the good work that you've done prior to going on recruiting for the role gets ignored.

And so as an example, and maybe this is where we start, the right compensation team is going to start with something like a total compensation or a total rewards philosophy. That's really important to anchor how you're going to value jobs in which markets.

And so, for instance, if you are with a smaller startup and your founders have said, "Hey, engineering is the most important part of the startup," your total comp philosophy might say, "Hey, we're going to target the sixtieth or seventieth percentile for new hire engineers, while right now we're going to target AEs who are at the fiftieth or below."

And unless you've written that down and have the conversation out loud, it gets really tough to make the right offers to the right type of candidates. It's actually even tough for talent acquisition to target the right candidates. Because if you're bringing in engineers that are sixth to seventh percentile, that's a different type of engineer.

And if you bring in AEs who are fiftieth or below, that's a different type of AE. And founders also don't understand this, which is, you know, if we want to put an emphasis on a part of the business and we're going to pay really well there to get the best talent, it might mean that we're not going to pay as well in other parts of the business because we've decided to prioritize one thing over another.

Unless you've had that out-loud conversation and talent acquisition goes out to get the best of the best of the best in every function, well, A, your burn rate is going to go way up. And B, you're going to end up with people who might be misaligned with the business.

A superstar AE who you're paying at sixtieth or seventieth percentile is going to expect different things from the business in terms of support and structure than a less capable or more junior AE would. Engineer is the same way. Engineer coming in at sixty, seventy percentile knows that he or she can be the star in this wizard of a programmer because there's other things happening in the background that support them focusing on that.

So, you know, alignment at the very beginning is probably where we need to start.

Peter McKee: That makes a lot of sense. And I think kind of feeds into one of the other questions we wanted to have, which is really like the practical advice on how we can avoid getting into kind of those disconnect situations.

So, you know, in this, what you already talked about is just making sure we're planning upfront. I also loved the shout-out to educating the boss or bosses on how sometimes—

Joe Bast: It's a hard one, you know, because compensation knowledge in general isn't widely distributed. It's a pretty deep specialty. And there are ways you can get better at it by, you know, whether it's, you know, through conferences or certifications, but it's one thing to know it. It's another thing to help people learn it.

And I do think that your right compensation person is frequently educating lots of people about what compensation is and what goes into it and what it's about and why we make the choices we do, whether that's the boss or founder or whether that's talent acquisition.

Talent acquisition is probably, other than employee relations, probably is the most tactical function within HR. And because it's tactical, it's fast. Lots of things happen, decisions happen quickly. And when decisions happen quickly, if there hasn't been good information shared prior, or if we haven't had good conversation about what expectations are prior, those decisions aren't necessarily always aligned.

So again, preparation, good conversations. And as you and I talked about earlier, the smaller you are, the easier this is because the people sit near each other and collaboration is quite simple. When you're big and you have an entire compensation team and a very large TA team, if you don't have regularly scheduled meetings to review not just individual openings, but changes in compensation strategy or looking at how we're landing compared to what we expected for these offers, those things need to be regularly scheduled or you're going to miss them.

Peter McKee: I love that point. I mean, I feel like the common knowledge here might be communication is how you prevent those disconnects from happening. And your point about regularly scheduled, I'd love to, even if you could elaborate on that a bit more in what you've seen from growing from small to medium size or large, what do those sinks look like? Or is it just the leaders? Who would you put in that? What would the topics be?

Joe Bast: Yeah. So let's talk large first, because it requires the most structure. And so as you get bigger, as Series C, maybe even a little bit before that, your board hopefully is going to ask you to put together a compensation committee. And their real goal is probably to talk about founder or executive compensation. And that's a good enough reason to get together with them.

But if you're doing your work as a compensation person correctly, you're actually going to talk full comp strategy. Yes, there's a strategy that involves high-level leaders, but it also solicits their opinions on what's important to the business right now. And what does that mean for different functions as we roll out? Because when you're going to tell them that we're going to value sales over engineering, there's two people in that room are going to immediately come to blows so that the CTO and the CRO would be like, wait, sales is more important than engineering.

Well, it's not that it's more important, but right now in the business, because we're big and we're in growth mode, we need to get superstar AEs and that's why we're going to pay at the sixtieth percentile.

Now, once you've had that conversation, and so you're not just talking executive comp with that board comp committee, you're actually talking about your strategy across every function. Once you have that conversation, now you can go sit and you publish your job bands, you talk with your TAs about where we're trying to hire. So all the expectations are set.

The next step is regularly scheduled meetings to review where our offers are landing. So where are we getting rejections? Right now, the talent market isn't as hot as it has been in the past, which gives you two things. One is it gives you more time to structure, which is great, but it also gives you fewer declines, which is really hard because those declines or that feedback is super informative to where you have to be bidding to get the right talent.

And in a market where people aren't going to say yes to everything, but they're probably going to say yes to less than they would have three years ago. You need to take every single decline you get and figure out why. And whether that's because you have a great recruiter who's having open conversations with candidates and then feeding that back somehow to the team that's doing your comp, or whether that's you have a candidate experience process which involves a survey and it talks about why someone had declined the offer, but you need that reason.

And by the way, people decline for lots of reasons. It's not always compensation. But compensation, if it is the target, is probably the easiest thing to adjust in that process. You know, if they're declining because of culture or because of the leaders they met, it's harder to action, but it's pretty easy to action if someone's declining on comp.

Peter McKee: Yeah, that's a really important point too. It is one of the important reasons, not the only reason. I know we definitely hear that talking to total rewards leaders that some of the other organizations might be quick to blame compensation in these conversations. So important to drill into each data point.

I guess on that point, have definitely heard that uh even maybe increasingly today a lot of rewards leaders look at offer data in addition to uh survey data, benchmark data that they might be using to build their pay ranges. What's your take on that? Like where, how does offer data, how does data that you're getting from the talent acquisition team fit into how you're constructing your pay ranges?

Joe Bast: So I think it's a validation of what you built. And so in validation, it's probably too strong a word. It is directional feedback about what you've built, meaning if people are accepting and they're feeling good about it and you have great offer acceptance rates, then you're probably doing something close to what that talent pool is expecting.

And if they are declining or consistently declining, then you probably built a range wrong. Now, it's not also just about the ranges. Remember, if we talk about our total comp philosophy, if we are targeting higher pay for engineers, we should expect more acceptances. And if we are targeting lower pay for AEs, then we should expect lower declines.

But guess what? If we're getting lots of declines on AEs with a lower band, our TA team is probably targeting the wrong candidate. You know, and so this is an important criteria. It's like these things are not linear. You know, if we're getting all sorts of declines on AEs and therefore the chief revenue officer says, "Oh, we have to increase our base salary or we have to target the right type of talent pool."

And by the way, if you are targeting the right type of talent, but let's continue with this example of engineering is what we're gonna pivot towards and sales is we're gonna pivot away from for right now. If you're targeting say, fortieth percentile, forty-fifth percentile for AEs, you're not looking for bad AEs, but maybe you're looking for more junior AEs. And they're gonna say yes to lower comp if they have some things like the right learning platform or the right people to learn from or the right leader to follow.

You know, they're going to value things differently in the hiring process. So just getting decline feedback doesn't necessarily inform the fact that we need to pay the ranges. It can inform the fact that we need to target different candidates or we need to highlight something else that's part of the offer process, whether it's equity, career development.

Here's one for you. We recently, as you may know, implemented Aeqium and we started with the visual offer process. And our decline rates were not bad. We're getting a lot of acceptances. But just before launching the visual offer process, I had two declines and basically they cited that the pay was lower than what they had expected.

Without changing the pay range, but by putting our benefits information in a financial lane or visual offer letters, all of a sudden people are accepting immediately. And one of our relatively senior directors came in and said, "You know, I really appreciated the visual offer letter because that's twenty-two thousand dollars in health care that I'm not going to have to spend. And I didn't realize that that was gonna be on top of the salary."

So not to, this is a pretty gratuitous plug, but the idea of offers are more than compensation, more than direct total cash. They also have to do with the benefits, the opportunities, the culture that you're providing.

So I think I got a little off topic there, but the idea is that total rewards is total rewards. It's not just total cash.

Peter McKee: Absolutely. Yeah. And so I'm hearing, hey, we take the offer data. One, we establish how much of a signal that offer data should be towards our compensation ranges, because it may be no signal, it may be a lot of signal. And then we kind of—

Joe Bast: And it can be a signal to TA to change how they're prospecting, to change how they're outbounding.

Peter McKee: That's right. And so if you do, and maybe you can answer this on behalf of total rewards leaders you've managed or how you've done this and you run these processes before, if you find out that you're getting the offer data and you do calibrate it to comp of, hey, it looks like our pay ranges, we're getting too many declines and comp is the reason. How do you factor that in? How do you take those data points and kind of reconcile that with the pay ranges you might have built off survey data?

Joe Bast: Yeah. So let's look at the top of the range, the bottom of the range, and I'll stick with this example of pivoting towards engineering. If we've built ranges that are the sixtieth or sixty-fifth percentile as their center, and those are the types of engineers we're seeking, and we're still getting declines, we very much have to dig into why, because we're likely paying over market for these roles, and why are they saying no?

And I think that's, TA can get some of that from their debriefs, but there's other places in the organization you can get that. And part of that is who are the hiring managers? And it might not be a compensation leader's place. Maybe it's employee relations, maybe it's an HRBP, maybe it's your head of people, but let's take a look at the hiring managers. What experience are they giving?

Because if I'm an engineer and you're gonna pay me sixty-fifth percentile and you make that offer to me, and I know it's more than market, but I ran into someone in the hiring process who I don't want to work for. That's a different piece of feedback.

Similarly, if we're getting AEs who are targeting below market and they're telling us yes really quickly, even though we're paying low, what is it that they're saying yes about? Because that's probably something that's not specific to sales. Maybe it's the culture. Maybe it's the benefits. Maybe it's the learning and development stipend that we have. There's lots of things that go into that decision.

So I think the feedback that I give both to my TA and comp leaders in this environment is that there's no specific piece of feedback that is just one or the other every time. Meaning we have to look at the feedback that we get in these declines as potentially affecting either side of the fence.

Peter McKee: Yeah, that is really important. One of the biggest words I'm taking away from here is the feedback. What is the signal we're getting from the candidate, from the hiring manager, from the TA team?

We talked a little bit about kind of early on, hey, having this recurring meeting maybe where you get total rewards and TA on the same team, on the same page of music. Any other techniques that you have in mind for, hey, how do we ensure that feedback is actually getting where it needs to go with the quality of signal that you need it to be?

Joe Bast: So what's really interesting and as you get bigger you have more of this data, when you're little it's harder. But talent acquisition has lots of different metrics, and they tend to publish the ones that they love—many of us do. And so they publish, you know, cost per hire or time to fill.

And then they take the decline information and they hide it. And they might hide the frequency, and it's not their fault. They have to know, like, you know, one of the secrets is there's no blame here. You know, we're trying to solve a problem together. And that doesn't mean you nor I are to blame.

We're trying to solve a problem together. And what that means is we need transparency in the feedback. It doesn’t have to be the whole organization, but if talent acquisition and comp aren’t going over feedback on the declines, or even feedback on the number of hits that a post might get in, if you're in markets where you're posting salary ranges, and you're getting fewer hits than you would...

Let me say this differently. If you're getting a higher ratio of applications to hits or a lower ratio of applications to hits, it might have to do with the published range. But the feedback needs to be published. It can't be anecdotal. It's, "Oh, we had this one offer where this engineer said this."

It's like, okay, so we're going to collect all the feedback throughout the month. And so let's say you're at a company with, you know, you're Series D, you have eleven hundred people. You're probably hiring seventy people a month, maybe, depending on your turnover rate.

Within those seventy, even if you have ten percent declines, which is a little high, you have seven data points. And over the course of a quarter, you're going to have twenty or thirty data points. Well, that's data that should be on a chart, and we should have decline codes in our ATS.

And so again, you know, this is— you’ll find out the more we talk— I'm all about tooling, meaning I can keep a lean team and I can keep a team that's focused on the right stuff if I have the right tools and if they integrate. And so most ATSs worth their salt have categories for not just declines, but decline reasons. And that particular piece of data is the one that you need to share with between compensation and TA. And if you can do it in a monthly meeting, all the better.

Peter McKee: That's awesome. Yeah. Not only track the data, but it sounds like have the culture where people are expected to and are okay with sharing why are we losing sometimes.

Joe Bast: Absolutely. And having recruiters that understand that them choosing one of these reasons is not them accepting nor assigning blame. It's them measuring what happened. And it's hard, especially if you're in a startup and you have, in recruiting, you tend to have younger professionals that don't know that them choosing the reason for a decline is not taking or assigning blame.

And so let's be objective. Why did it happen? Because if we know why it happened and it's real, then we can address it. If we're always saying, "Accepted another offer," and we don't get anything else in there, it's not going to help us.

Peter McKee: Totally. We've talked about a number of different techniques that can be helpful for getting those teams on the same page over time. If you're trying to give advice to a new total rewards leader, maybe you just got hired into an organization, what would be your kind of top thing or top couple of things for them to do coming onto the job to make sure that they build that healthy collaboration with TA over time?

Joe Bast: Yeah, it's funny because when we talk about bringing someone new, especially someone with a specialty in organization, we'll frequently talk about, well, you know, share your reasoning, share your methodology, share your practice, you know, help people learn. And I said this earlier, you know, the more that comp leaders can coach and share about what they know, the better.

But that's actually not the first piece of advice. The first piece of advice is relationships. If you are a new leader in any function, but particularly in compensation or HR anywhere, your first priority for your first thirty, sixty, ninety has to be to build deep relationships with other leaders that you're going to frequently collaborate with. And you need to build those relationships before there's problems, because if you're there sixty days and you don't have a relationship and something blows up, it's the wrong time to form the relationship.

And so the more you can do to build real, authentic relationships with people, taking interest in what they do and why they do what they do, trying to learn from them the specialty that they have so that they'll be open to learn the specialty that you have. Those relationships are paramount. After that, people will be open to sharing feedback, both positive and negative, more freely. They'll be open to more candor and transparency.

But without the relationship, you start to get in a feedback cycle that's challenging. With no relationship, people are going to hide. And hiding something, making something opaque, perpetuates a problem or makes it worse rather than helps it.

Peter McKee: That last part resonates so much, especially tying back to what you said before. It's hard enough to get people to share why they're having misses or losses. But if they don't have a good relationship with the person who's looking for the data, you're never going to get there.

Joe Bast: Definitely. The other thing I would say is it's not just— especially in a situation where you're valuing jobs, you're making job offers. The hiring managers are actually very involved in this process. They're not sitting on the sidelines. And so involving them as much as you can as well, especially if you start to see a theme.

So if TA and compensation get together for their monthly and the theme is we're getting engineering declines, but that's the only function. The two of them going together to the hiring managers in engineering or the engineering leader and saying, "Hey, we noticed this trend. We want to talk with you about why." Maybe there's something going on in engineering that neither of us know about, or maybe something in the industry that none of us know about.

And so, real quick example, it happened probably seven, maybe ten months ago. We started getting all sorts of engineering declines, even though we pivot heavily on it, and they were all going to AI companies. And it was the worst thing in the world because all this very new hot area, and we're losing lots of engineers to the offers. And it's not because we're not paying enough. It's because they want to go to this industry that's really shiny and new.

And so, you know, figuring that out and then talking with our CTO, we wanted to start to highlight other things in our offers because we're not, you can't just overpay. Like these AI companies are paying at the ninetieth percentile. We’re not going to be able to compete there. But we can compete on things like learning and development. We can compete on things like we're fully remote. We can compete on things like benefits, on equity.

But it was really interesting to see that where people were going was all AI and we couldn't buy. And so we had to pivot the message.

Peter McKee: That makes sense. You've got to play to your strengths. You're never going to be the top package across every dimension.

Joe Bast: Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

Peter McKee: Really appreciate the thoughts here, Joe, as we go towards the end of the conversation. Also appreciate the plug earlier on. I've been fortunate enough to be partners at your last two organizations. Would love if you could give us just the quick take on, for any other people leaders who may not have heard of Aeqium, how you'd describe it to them and any value that you've gotten out of it.

Joe Bast: Yeah, so I've been working with Aeqium for about two years. And there's a lot of different sides to the product. And I think sometimes that's not always obvious to people who haven't worked with it. And there's different amounts of investment in both time and money.

But what I'll tell you is this. Different companies come to the compensation conversation in different places. And figuring out where your organization is and where you need to start the conversation is really important.

And so as an example, as I said, we started with visual offer letters with Aeqium, and I thought our primary use case was going to be compensation cycles because this organization that I joined six months ago has had very little structure around compensation cycles. But what became very, very apparent is people in general were more interested in their total compensation, and managers in particular wanted to see their team's total compensation.

So we actually accelerated the launch of the team view and total rewards portal to help educate our leaders and our employees about what compensation looks like, about their own compensation and how to talk about it. Yes, we're coming up to the end of Q4 here. We're definitely moving into a compensation planning cycle, but to be able to give people a view into their own comp and managers a view into their team's comp was really helpful.

And I actually think it's gonna help with the comp cycle that we're going into because they'll have different vocabulary and different perspectives on how to talk about it.

So I don't know. I narrowed it right down because I think I talked about, you know, three, four sides to your product already. You know, I think the most important part is that regardless of where you're at as a company with your compensation journey, there's probably a place where Aeqium could help you.

Peter McKee: I love that framing of it and really appreciate you taking the time, Joe. And thanks to everyone else who was able to join for this episode in the Total Rewards series. Joe, hope to talk to you again soon.

Joe Bast: I'm sure we will. It's great to talk.

Peter McKee: All right. Bye.

Joe Bast: Bye now.

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