Introducing Sparksuite’s open salary calculator: transparent, predictable, and fair pay scales
Transparency is one of my core goals for the Sparksuite family. We took a big leap toward that end when we publicly published our employee handbook over two years ago. Today, we’re taking another large step in that direction by releasing our open salary calculator.
Let’s take a dive into why we’ve chosen to do this and how we carefully designed our pay scales to promote not only transparency but predictability & fairness too.
Why transparency for salaries?
For potential job candidates, salary is arguably one of the most important considerations. Many candidates will apply for or rule out a job purely on salary alone, so it’s going to be one of the first questions candidates ask before agreeing to screens or interviews. We believe it’s best for both the company and the candidate if we’re upfront about the salary, so as to avoid wasting anyone’s time.
Knowing this, our job listings have always included a starting salary range. While this is a relatively common practice, these ranges can sometimes be rather wide, without a clear indication of where candidates should expect to fall within a range or what factors affect that.
Furthermore, a starting salary is just one part of a larger story. Equally as important is where that salary is headed (and how fast!). This is often much more opaque than a starting salary, yet candidates and team members alike should know when to expect promotions and raises and how those are determined. Openness on this front is wise simply because it eliminates uncertainty and shows that your company is invested in its employees long-term.
Finally, a properly designed and transparent pay scale helps ensure team members are compensated fairly, reducing the impact of biases and preventing people from wondering whether a colleague performing equal work is making equal pay.
Our design methodology
In crafting our own salary calculator, we studied the design and reasoning behind salary calculators published by other tech companies like Buffer, Stack Overflow, GitLab, and Codacy. We took the insight we gathered from them and paired it with our own company’s structure and goals.
We’ve designed our formula to be based on three factors: role, level, and years of service. Here’s what those terms mean:
- Role. The type of work the individual does, such as “front end engineer” or “customer success champion.”
- Level. Reflects the team member’s experience and responsibilities. Somone at level one (Roman numeral “I”) is likely new to their profession, whereas someone at a lead level has leadership duties and more experience.
- Years of service. How long an individual has worked in the Sparksuite family of companies within a particular field. “Field” here refers to a general area of expertise (e.g. engineering or customer success).
A distinct decision we made was to emphasize years of service as one of the more significant attributes that affects a team member’s pay over time. We’ve done this for a couple of reasons…
First, we’ve found that familiarity with our company’s specific set of tools, workflows, codebases, and technologies is often more impactful for someone’s ability to contribute efficiently than skill/experience. In other words, someone with a great deal of familiarity with how we operate is generally able to contribute more efficiently than someone who may have more experience but is much newer to our company.
Second, it is one of the fairest and most predictable ways to provide raises to our team. Raises based on performance are inherently subjective, too often unclear, inconsistent company-wide, and prone to biases. Not only do tenure-based raises minimize these concerns, but they also incentive the company to teach and invest in its employees. The responsibility is therefore on the company to design a culture where team members are equipped to learn and expand their skills over time, and where people strive to perform at their best because they love what they do and where they work… not because their manager is dangling an arbitrary performance-based raise in front of them.
One other note about the years of service factor is that it’s designed to provide larger raises to newer and less experienced team members. This design reflects the notion that these team members are learning more rapidly than team members who already have extensive professional experience or who have been with us for quite some time.
Where to next?
While we’ve crafted our calculator with scalability in mind, we fully expect it to evolve over time. Primarily, we expect to add additional fields/roles/levels as our team grows and to keep figures updated with market trends.
And although less likely, more significant changes may be made as we scale. Buffer, for instance, is on version 3 of their formula and Stack Overflow has made refinements to their calculator over time as well.
To keep track of these changes and to ensure they’re happening transparently, we’ve open sourced our salary calculator on GitHub.
I’m personally very excited about this step and look forward to continually finding new ways to ensure the Sparksuite family is well-taken care of!
If we seem like the type of company you’d want to work for, we may be hiring! Check out our careers page for more information.
