1-minute tip: Kill boring bullet points from your Compensation presentations

We’ll soon be entering into the full swing of conference season, and have been booked to speak and/or chair at some events in the region over the coming months. More on that very soon as I would love to meet some of my readers at these events :-). Communication skills are significant for Compensation pros…

A useful reference matrix on equity compensation

In this edition of Sunday Skills, I want to lead you to a great synthetic document created by Performensation, a consulting company which “provides customized performance based compensation solutions to organizations of all sizes in the Americas and Europe”. Performensation is led by Dan Walter, an expert on executive / equity compensation who is also…

Time saver tip – Custom Views in Excel

There is a nagging challenge that my team and I have encountered for a long time, and I’m sure all HR and Compensation pros have faced the same. You see, we build files with confidential information about all our employees, such as their package, performance ratings, promotion potential etc. We then share partial views of…

How to search the connections of one of your LinkedIn direct contacts

Did you know that LinkedIn recently added a new functionality allowing you to search the connections of your first-degree contacts individually ? I discovered this not long ago thanks to a post from Marla Tabaka at Inc.com, in which she covers recent changes to how you can update your LinkedIn profile. On this specific topic…

Cleaning misspelled names in Excel

HR and Compensation pros often receive data from many different sources, and one of the first challenges is often the fact that the names of the employees have been input with spelling mistakes, which makes the use of the information almost impossible. My first comment, as usual, is to use the Employee ID number as…

Use the Left or Right function in Excel to extract text from a cell

The Left and Right functions are very useful for managing text in Excel files. Let’s imagine you have text in a field and you want to retrieve from it only the characters on the left. To give you an idea, the field has grades which are composed of 2 digits indicating the level of the…

Compensation Geek, hero of the Recruitment team !

Imagine the situation : your colleague in Recruitment is looking to prepare the package offer for a candidate. This candidate is already working in the same GCC country as your company, but their pay is composed differently than yours. Their current package is composed of basic and a single living allowance, as well as a sales…