In his former life as a chief people officer, Nolan Church came to realize just how much power employers wielded during salary negotiations. “The thing that I noticed being on the employer side of the table is that we have all of this data when we make offers,” says Church, who previously led people operations at DoorDash and fintech startup Carta. “On the other side of the market, you have employees and candidates. And what they have is basically their own personal network and unverified compensation data, and that’s it.”
To help arm tech workers with more information, Church—who most recently founded Continuum, a talent marketplace for executive talent—just launched a platform called FairComp. The goal is for FairComp to be a resource for workers who want to evaluate a job offer or check their salaries against that of their colleagues, by effectively giving them access to the type of information that employers use to set compensation. The company relied on publicly available information for its initial data set, scraping compensation data from platforms like Glassdoor and relying on Church’s network of chief people officers to substantiate those numbers. As FairComp collects pay information from users, it will build out its own user-generated database.
Many of the public data sources that currently exist—like Glassdoor—are both difficult to verify and limited in scope, making them an imperfect solution for workers who want some kind of benchmark. The companies that sell compensation data to employers, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with keeping their business, rather than building a platform that would cater to workers.
At the moment, FairComp is still in a closed beta and fewer than 500 users, but Church says its waitlist is already in the tens of thousands. The company has initially launched with pay data on IT roles, but the plan is to expand to other departments within the next month. (Eventually, Church says it will monetize the platform, but right now users gain access to compensation data when they contribute to FairComp’s data set.) FairComp is currently focusing its data set on tech employers that have at least 100 employees—say, a company that is at least at the Series A stage of fundraising; this approach also helps ensure the data is fully anonymized. “Anything below 100 employees, we’re not going to touch for the foreseeable future,” Church says. “Because there’s a ton of variance in equity, cash, and company type.”
Where pay transparency laws fall short
Pay transparency has gained traction in recent years, especially as lawmakers have focused their attention on the issue in an effort to mitigate race and gender-based pay inequities. In states like New York and California, pay transparency laws have given prospective hires new insight into how companies pay their employees, by requiring employers to include salary bands and hourly wages in job listings. (To date, eight states have enacted pay transparency laws—though not all of them explicitly require pay ranges in job listings—and several other states have introduced bills of their own.) Still, Church argues that most companies have only done “the bare minimum to check the box,” and that most employers are not incentivized to fully embrace pay transparency beyond what is legally required. In fact, as Fast Company reported recently, some companies have shown themselves to be adept at loosely interpreting salary transparency requirements, and few employers have faced steep fines for violations so far.
“These laws are well intended,” Church says. “They’re trying to help people. There’s clearly a problem with the way that the game is currently played, so [the] government tried to come in and say: ‘How do we solve this thing?’ The issue is companies skirted this really fast.” Pay transparency legislation also doesn’t account for the complexities of compensation in industries like tech, where equity can be a major component of an employee’s pay package. “I don’t think legislators really understand equity,” Church says. “The thing that they optimized for was cash.”
“Building HR for employees”
That’s where Church believes a platform like FairComp could prove most useful. One of the key areas where FairComp is hoping to offer more transparency is equity compensation. “Right now, we are really trying to nail the equity piece because that’s the thing that everybody wants,” Church says. “That’s the big black box.”
In addition to compiling compensation data, FairComp has rolled out an AI-based negotiation coach, which allows workers to practice negotiating with an employer and get advice on how to approach those discussions. (The AI is being trained on real negotiation advice from Church, which he offers for free to FairComp users in exchange for recording their conversations.) The company is also working on a pay equity tool that will analyze any inequities on the basis of gender and race—again, with the intent of offering workers more visibility into a process that is typically conducted by an HR department or third-party auditing service.
“HR is built to protect the company and to help the company,” Church says. “There is no solution on the employee side. And that’s ultimately what we’re trying to do—actually build an HR for employees.”
