CONTENTS
The challenge: weeks of research, too little time for pay equity
When salary benchmarking becomes a lengthy, manual, research-intensive process, the desired outcomes can be lost. Pay reviews are more than a tick-box exercise - they have a purpose: to improve employee retention, satisfaction, and productivity.
Instant Impact discovered a faster, easier way to tackle salary benchmarking - leaving them space to focus on fairness when it comes to compensation.
A highly manual benchmarking process
Instant Impact used to take multiple weeks to research salary benchmarks. They had considered using a major salary benchmarking consultancy, but did not have the budget - leaving them to utilise the resources they had to hand. That involved trawling through job boards and LinkedIn listings, asking ChatGPT, and combining all of that with their own candidate data.
A thorough process, but a time-intensive one with real limitations: niche roles were difficult to benchmark accurately, and a recent evolution to their team structure meant new in-house roles added further complexity.
As a professional services business staffed with a variety of service providers, finding accurate salary benchmarks is particularly difficult - they compensate differently to more straightforward, in-house roles.
Internally, another challenge is understanding pay equity across the business. That’s something we’re really trying to focus on at the moment, to ensure that internal equity is there and that the team is paid fairly both in relation to market rates and their colleagues.
This meant that salary benchmarking could not be a regular event. For some organisations, that reality would be quickly accepted - but Instant Impact had decided that pay transparency and equity were things they wanted to prioritise.
Rather than using a major salary consultancy, I’d actually prefer a trusted tool I can jump into when I’m asked pay questions - because they come up at different times, like when we’re recruiting for new roles and need to benchmark them.
Instant Impact: global workforce and a lean People team
Instant Impact provides talent solutions to medium-sized businesses, focused on industries in the professional services. They let you fully or partially outsource your recruitment processes and offer consulting services too - so their own talent needs are highly varied.
Currently, they have a large UK-based team - but also have other teams in South Africa and Thailand, so they are dealing with a globally dispersed workforce. That can be a challenge, especially when HR and Operations are managed by a modest team.
We’ve committed to our team that we’ll be salary benchmarking every six months, and communicating transparently, so they can see how we got to our pay decisions.
Angharad oversees a range of responsibilities related to onboarding and employee relations, while also finding time to prioritise organisational goals around compensation. That affordability and time-saving quality of any tooling is critical - especially given the year’s rise in National Insurance.
The solution: instant access, a large dataset, confident decisions
The nature of Instant Impact’s work means they talk to a lot of service providers - so they are always on the lookout for the best new HR technology. They started using Compensation IQ for their latest pay review process, and quickly discovered the benefits of having instant access to such a large amount of reliable, relevant data.
With filters for industry, location, company size, and other factors, Compensation IQ suited the needs of their global team.
Complementing existing data sources
The platform complemented their existing research methods, allowing Instant Impact to combine Compensation IQ’s data with their own candidate information. By connecting their own HR data, they could get a comprehensive overview comparing multiple external data sources with their own team’s compensation - including the distribution of their teams and salaries. Suddenly, that research stage was dramatically reduced.
The main benefit of Compensation IQ is how it complements our other data sources. It’s incredibly useful to have these salary benchmarks alongside our other data sources such as salary survey data and our own candidate information.
Confidence from a large dataset
The breadth of Compensation IQ’s data gave the team confidence when getting sign-off for pay decisions - as did the ability to present a clear breakdown to their leadership team, supporting that compensation conversation.
There’s a lot of benchmarks on there. Compensation IQ is capturing a lot of data, and that’s what stood out to me - and having a lot of benchmarks gives me a lot of confidence, because I know the slightest outlier can skew figures up or down, when you have a small data set, which affects the accuracy of the data.
What the solution unlocked
Instant access to relevant benchmark data
Where the old process took multiple weeks, Compensation IQ provided instant access to live, filtered salary data - dramatically reducing the research stage and freeing time for more strategic work.
A large dataset for defensible decisions
The platform’s breadth of data - across industries, locations and company sizes - meant Angharad could present pay decisions to leadership with confidence, knowing the benchmarks were based on substantial, reliable evidence.
Visual overviews for sharing with leaders
Clear, visual breakdowns within the platform made it straightforward to present compensation data to the leadership team and support transparent pay conversations - removing the guesswork from senior sign-off.
The impact: faster benchmarking, a commitment to fairness
With Instant Impact’s commitment to their staff for more frequent, transparent salary benchmarking periods, the ability to commit to six-monthly pay reviews is now a reality. That research stage - previously measured in weeks - is now dramatically reduced, letting Angharad and her team focus on the priorities of more frequent benchmarking exercises and a greater focus on pay equity.
A product team that listens
Instant Impact also spoke highly of our Product team’s helpful and responsive approach - and that we are open to feedback from all our customers, so we can make sure your needs are being met. As our product grows and evolves, we will be able to support their organisational priorities when it comes to compensation.
The team is incredibly receptive to feedback, and there’s a lot of development being done to the platform - that’s exactly what you want from HR tech.