Seer Salary Transparency & Compensation Strategy

Seer Compensation Strategy
November 2016
Prepared for:
Seer Team

© 2016 Seer Interactive • All Rights Reserved • Page 3
Background: why are we doing this?

Exit Interview Data showed that 2 in 5 employees who left Seer indicated that Career Opportunities
(upward mobility) and [lack of understanding surrounding] Compensation were the largest contributing
factors to their departure.

I got you.

Ground Rules & Expectations

1. THIS IS CONFIDENTIAL and intended for internal use only; please respect that
2. There will be mistakes; help us to find and fix them respectfully
3. Understand that this is something that we, as a company, will live into over the next several years
a. Creating ranges for all role levels is the first phase
4. Compensation is personal; just because someone has the same title as you ≠ same exact
compensation within specified range for the role
Ground Rules & Expectations

Goals
Understanding Transparency Correlation to
Performance

Understanding Transparency Correlation to Performance
Immediate Immediate Immediate
● How does Seer view and
manage my compensation?
● What’s my earning potential
and why?
● When am I eligible for a
raise?
● Access to all Seer Division
& level salary ranges
● How we stack up against
the market & why
● Performance matters; we’ll
keep processing &
assigning raises accordingly
Ultimate Ultimate Ultimate
● WHY (quantitatively) you
fall within the range you’re
in
● Maintain level of
transparency
● How you can impact your
raise
● Ability to forecast what you
can expect

Compensation Philosophy: General

We Believe in Total Compensation

We’re competitive.
● Every year, we’re committed to completing an industry benchmarking survey to ensure that our
ranges are competitive within our competitive set.
● We’ll update ranges annually to reflect market compensation to ensure that our ranges reflect the
40th to 90th + percentile of the market.
Compensation Philosophy: Cash Money

Your compensation will be reviewed at least 1x per year.
● We review your compensation once a year. But, we believe in hustle, and you’re all pretty ambitious.
That means you may get more than one raise within a year...or you might wait longer than a year.
However, we’ll review your compensation at least once a year.
○ Things we take into consideration:
■ How are you staffed, impact to Seer, revenue, retention, task forces; additionally, future
looking, how can we staff you in the future

Performance drives compensation.
● Experience counts, but performance primarily drives compensation. Growing client accounts? Have
100% client retention? Helping mentor and grow your coworkers? Consistently working to level up &
share ideas? Awesome, you’re probably paid more because of it. Twice a year you all have the
opportunity to opt-in to performance reviews to understand how you’re doing performance-wise.
[current state]

Considerations:
● Goal
● Current state
● Resources other agencies / companies use
● Output / variability in different resources vs. cost
Tool

Identify All Roles &
Respective Skills
Create Role Bank Define Competitive
Set
Define Percentiles
per Role
Build Ranges per
Role
Process

Process
Step One: Role build-out
➔ Identify ALL roles within company / DIVs
➔ “Shop” several relevant skills within Payscale to create a bank of skills relevant for each role within
each division.
◆ Survey team to identify top three skills required for their job [role + level]
➔ Collaborate with Division Directors to cross-check & adjust skills identified by the team as appropriate
➔ Finalized top three required skills for each role

Process
Step Two: Create role bank
➔ To create ‘role bank’ determine and build the following for each role level in the company:
◆ Seer title vs. Industry Recognized title
◆ Three top skills
◆ Years of experience required [MINIMUM] for each role level
◆ Define people management experience & type for each role level
◆ Add location parameters

Process
Step Three: Define industry competitive set
➔ Defining industry competitive set:
◆ Company size [number of employees]
◆ Type of company
◆ Industry
◆ Privately held / not publicly traded
◆ Location(s)
Note: “Who do we want to compete with” was considered. I.e., should we broaden size, shift parameters to
go outside of our competitive set as it relates to compensation.

For every role, we ‘shopped’ the following parameters to come up with five percentiles of
compensation:
Process
● Location [PHL vs. SD]
● Type of company [privately held]
● Industry of company [Marketing &
advertising]
● Size of company [# of employees]
● Industry-recognized title
● Top three skills required
● Years of experience [MIN] for each role level
● People management experience required
● TYPE of people management experience
required
○ Assigning and evaluating work vs.
hiring, firing, setting compensation, etc
Step Four: Define percentiles

per·cen·tile
/pərˈsenˌtīl/
A percentile (or a centile) is a measure used in statistics indicating the value below which a given
percentage of observations in a group of observations fall. For example, 20th percentile is the value (or
score) below which 20% of the observations may be found.

Step Four: QA data // spot check percentiles pulled
➔ Re-run criteria built in role bank to confirm no inconsistencies in data …
AND THEN...
Process

Inconsistent
Data.
Everywhere.

Step Four: Define percentiles per role
➔ Data changes all the time. The numbers that you run will differ from the percentiles shared with you.
➔ To most accurately build ranges that reflect data fluctuations, all roles were pulled a total of 5 times
over the course of a two week period.
➔ Once we had 2 weeks of data, we averaged each percentile.
◆ So, for example, each percentile you see [10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th] is the average of 5
different data pulls for that specific percentile.
◆ Data was scrubbed for any large variances. e.g., if there was an up or downswing in a day of
~10K, that data was removed from the set by which the average percentile was built.
Process

Percentiles Example
Comp Percentiles
10th 25th 50th 75th 90th PHL
$xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx SEO
Associate
$xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx Sr. SEO
Associate
$xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx SEO Manager
$xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx Sr. SEO
Manager
$xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx Team Lead

Step Five: Build ranges per role
➔ Review data
➔ Consider “Seer data”
◆ Role difference across divisions & impact to Seer
◆ Division size / revenue
◆ Career trajectory; considering roles where someone may choose to stay vs. move on (want to
enable this and ensure earning potential exists)
➔ Determine where we are comfortable falling for ranges across the board; put a stake in the ground.
e.g., our range minimum doesn’t dip below 40th percentile and extends to 90th sometimes far
exceeding 90th percentile for specific roles
➔ Federal Overtime Legislation
Process

Step Five: Review ranges with Division Directors
➔ Identify any issues / challenges with proposed ranges
➔ Identify team members that are outliers within ranges
➔ Confirm adjustments & payroll cycle adjustments will take place to communicate to team members
Process

Impact: Immediate
You could be impacted in two ways:
● Your salary is under the minimum role level range
● Your salary exceeds the maximum for your role level range

● Your salary is under the minimum role level range: we’ve already met and it’s been adjusted
● Your salary exceeds the maximum for your role level range
Impact: Immediate

● Your salary is under the minimum role level range: we’ve already met and it’s been adjusted
● Your salary exceeds the maximum for your role level range: we’ll meet and discuss. Don’t worry,
no one’s salary is going to be decreased!
Impact: Immediate

Understanding Transparency Correlation to Performance
Immediate Immediate Immediate
● How does Seer view and
manage my compensation?
● What’s my earning potential
and why?
● When am I eligible for a
raise?
● Access to all Seer Division
& level salary ranges
● How we stack up against
the market & why
● Performance matters; we’ll
keep processing &
assigning raises accordingly
Ultimate Ultimate Ultimate
● WHY (quantitatively) you
fall within the range
you’re in
● Maintain level of
transparency
● How you can impact your
raise
● Ability to forecast what
you can expect

There are two types of raises that can occur:
● On-cycle
● Off-cycle
Raise Cadence & Process

On-cycle raises
● Occur once a year at the same time each year
● Compensation is / will be reviewed annually at the time of your Seer anniversary
● Performance warranted raises occur at this time (with or without a promotion)

Process [Immediate / Current]:
● Conversation with your Director
● Your director will reach out to schedule time
to chat with you to discuss compensation at
the time of your employee anniversary
● Raise is communicated [or not] and email
confirmation sent to you, Finance, People
Team for processing
On-cycle raises
Process [Future]:
● More involvement at Team Lead level
● Direct correlation between performance
review(s) + raise amount
● Ability to forecast how this conversation will
go in advance

Off-cycle raises
● Occur… yep, you guessed it, off of the regular cycle (i.e., your Seer anniversary cycle)
● Occur because you’ve been kicking major ass + working hard so one of the following things is
happening:
○ You’re being promoted!
○ You’re taking on a brand new role!
○ You’re shifting into a new role within an existing Division [just changing your career-course a
bit!]
○ You’re in the same role but taking on additional responsibility and having major impact on the
company!
● Any promotion or position shift with new / additional responsibilities (unless it’s a completely lateral
shift) will warrant a raise

Off-cycle raises
Process [current]:
● Team Lead or Director will schedule time
with you & communicate promotion
● Promotion & raise will be confirmed via
email to you, Finance, and People Team for
processing
● People Team will work with you on
#promotioncommotion
How can YOU impact this? [future]
● Consider what you want; are you gunning
for something?
● Understand what you need to do / have
experience with to get it
● Tell people what you’re aiming for, namely,
your Team Lead and Director
● Set goals, measure progress, work & check
in on how you’re doing … even if it’s not an
official performance review

Performance Integration
Current State: Performance matters and is taken into consideration for all
compensation decisions
Things that are reviewed internally / discussed:
● Current role level
● Staffing: current projects vs. projects that you’re slated for [More complex? Larger revenue? More
responsibility?]
● Accomplishments over some period of time [6-12 months]
● Ambition [what have you run with?]
● Overall impact to the company [task forces, team player / helping to grow others, culture, etc]
Although you might not notice, the bullets above although worded differently, are all item outlined and reflected in our
performance anchors.

We’re going to keep on doing what we’ve been doing for the time being.
Why?
● It’s the right thing to do, it’s fair.
During Phase Two, the primary focus is performance integration:
● Making refinements
● Implementing appropriate system and process to support needs
● Launching this!
Performance Integration

Seer Divisions + Role Considerations:
● Difference / variance in cost of job specific “skill”
● Seer role vs. industry definition
○ Does a PPC Manager’s role differ from an SEO Manager’s role? There are a different set of
skills required, but foundationally, these roles do the same thing for the company.
● Revenue of Division
○ Does the revenue of the Division appropriately warrant the compensation rate extended to the
team? It’s the same mentality of “start-ups” typically paying less until they’ve established some
footing.
● Impact / value of role to Seer
○ Does the value that a certain Division or role drives warrant a greater differential in
compensation? In general, we didn’t see any roles fall into this category.
Seer Salary Ranges: Ranges & Logic

To be fair & equitable, and in some cases, to protect confidentiality within small Divisions, we created
location-specific Role Groupings.
The following disciplines are grouped together and share the same range minimums and
maximums for all role levels:
● SEO, Technical SEO, & PPC
● ANA
● CRE: Design, Dev, & Project Management
● CE: Client Engagement
● Business Strategy: Business Strategy & Marketing
● Operations: People, Account / FIN, IT, & Office Management

Let’s walk through an example...

Percentiles
10th 25th 50th 75th 90th
SEO
Associate
$xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx
Tech SEO
Associate
PPC
Associate
Let’s walk through an example: Associate [PHL] - SEO, Tech SEO, PPC

Philadelphia Associate: SEO, Tech SEO, PPC
Variance in Cost of
Skill
Seer role vs. industry
definition
Revenue of Division Impact / value of role
to Seer
Small
Min: $1.6k
Max: $3k
Similar Close Equal
Role Grouping Example
Ultimate decision: Group SEO, Tech SEO, and PPC together

Philadelphia
SEO, Technical SEO, PPC
Role Seer Min. Payscale Min. Seer Max. Payscale Max.
Associate $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx
Sr. Associate $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx
Manager $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx
Sr. Manager $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx
Team Lead $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx
Sr. Team Lead $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx
Associate DIR $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx

Philadelphia
Analytics

Philadelphia
Creative, Design, Dev, Project Manager

Philadelphia
Client Engagement

Philadelphia
Business Strategy, Marketing

Philadelphia
Operations: People, Accounting/Finance, IT, Office mgmt

San Diego
SEO, Technical SEO, PPC
Sr. Team Lead $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx
Associate DIR $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx

San Diego
Client Engagement

Philadelphia & San Diego
Executive Leadership: Directors
Director $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx $xx,xxx

“I’m at the bottom of my range...why?”

“You talked about a ~2K differential in using
the paid version of payscale, that 2K matters
to me!”

“I’m pretty far from the top of my range...and
I’ve been with Seer for a little over 2 years?”

“What if I’m at the top of my range?”

“What if I get promoted, but my current
compensation is above the minimum for the
role I’m promoted into?”

“How do you make the determination of
where a new hire will fall within a range?”

“I feel like I’m underpaid, I’d like to
understand more about ranges and why I fall
where I do.”

“I’ve been getting feedback that I’ve been
absolutely “killing it” over the last two
months; can I expect a raise sooner than a
year?”

“What if my anniversary just passed? Should
I have gotten a raise?”

Next Steps
● Deck + content arsenal to be shared out to company by EOD
● Specific compensation appointment slots with Em / Directors to discuss / ask questions on wiki
[Employee Resources → Compensation]
● Video to be produced and available in Q1 to watch @ anytime [will be segmented]
● Q1 start to Phase Two; timeline and roll-out / launch plans to be shared in 2017 Company Kick-Off
Meeting

Supporting Resources
Submit your quick one-off questions here
Request a meeting with Em + your Division Director here
Seer Salary Ranges
Compensation Philosophy One-Sheeter
Payscale benchmarking raw data [to run a report on your own]
FAQs

To learn more about the process of launching
compensation strategy and salary transparency at
our company, visit our website!

Seer Salary Transparency & Compensation Strategy

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