A double celebration

Today is special for 2 reasons : first, it’s my birthday and I have actually taken the day off. I’m treating myself to a long week-end in Dubai at the Raffles hotel, and intend to fully enjoy their exceptional spa treatments 🙂 … And second, this my 100th blog post. A big milestone ! When I started…

Compensation provider Birches Group extends its reach in the region – an interview with Warren Heaps

My friend Warren Heaps is a Partner at Birches Group, an independent consulting firm specialised in providing compensation information in over 180 emerging and developing countries. Birches Group very recently announced that they have entered into an agreement with Aon Hewitt, one of the major global compensation consultancies. Under the partnership, Aon Hewitt will make…

Should you rely on free compensation data from magazines and recruitment organisations?

Recently a few recruitment organisations have issued free “salary guides” for certain countries or industries. Magazines, whether business oriented or focused to the individual consumer, also run regular reports and guides with exciting titles like “Are you paid enough ?”. There are even websites where you can get free pay information (say, regarding a position…

Of average salaries in Europe

A while ago, a Sales Director asked for “an average salary for a sales/account manager in IT company selling specialty software within Europe”. I wish it were that simple but there is no such thing as a “salary in Europe”. For the same job, each country will pay different salaries. Salaries are normally always expressed…

The safeguards in salary benchmarking

Here is a paraphrase of a LinkedIn question asked recently : “How do you make sure each role benchmarked for salary purposes has the same responsibility ? Is there legislation on this ?” This is a question a Compensation specialist often gets from managers. Here is what you can reply when you get that question…

How to compare average and median salary information

I recently described how to calculate a percentile. Today I will clarify the difference between the average and the median. Technically, the average is the sum of all data points, divided by the number of data points. The median is the 50th percentile, or the value that splits the data points in two equal groups…

New hires vs employees : 3 salary situations and how to handle them

Imagine the scene : you are sitting at your desk, happily going along your normal HR activities, when an employee (let’s call him John) enters your office and expresses some concern over his compensation. More specifically, he says, he knows that some of his former colleagues at his previous employer, “who were earning the exact…