Compensation framework for a fully remote company with Marta Bisisi

Thomas Kohler:
Today’s guest, Marta, Bisisi. Now, when you look into the future, how do you need to adapt the model that it’s still very relevant?

Marta Bisisi:
Good question. So I really believe in, you know, iterative approaches, right? Like, you never build something and it’s gonna be like that forever. Right. I think if I look at, you know, our, our model going forward, for sure, we’ll need to, you know, recurrently look at targets, make sure that they are relevant, make sure that the job families are relevant as we go. Probably we’ll also have to, in the future, update our leveling systems, allow for more as the company grows. Right. So that you are not blocked by your own structure. We’ll probably, you know, I expect we’ll need to reduce our geographical regions, right.

As the world goes in a direction where probably salaries are a little more similar. Remote work is helping in that direction. Probably having job families will become less and. Sorry, having geo regions will become less and less relevant or just different, I think.

Thomas Kohler:
Are there any regions where you don’t hire at all in certain functions because your model just doesn’t allow it?

Marta Bisisi:
Yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, San Francisco Bay Area is an extremely expensive region and we believe we can find, you know, amazing talent somewhere else too. Right? We can find them. So in some cases, we say the same talent can be found in different geographical regions, maybe some regions that are a little bit less, I mean, where people wouldn’t expect to find that type of talent, right? Well, we know, and we go there and we try to find it. And I think it’s also part of our mission, right? Like the goal is to create equal opportunities worldwide. And it’s part of our, you know, mission to show that you can find amazing, amazing talent everywhere. You don’t have to go, you know, where everybody goes because it’s easier. Right.

A little bit of, you know, the job of my recruitment team is find those raw diamonds that live maybe not in the most common and most expected geo regions. You’re going to find amazing creatives, amazing project managers, amazing engineers. You can find them everywhere if you have a good way of assessing their, their value, their talent. And also you are curious enough to open up to other areas.

Thomas Kohler:
We talked about salary benchmarking, how to build out a compensation model for a remote company where every role is getting paid at the same level. And I think that’s also what we discussed. Controversial, because some companies say no cost of living, you need to include all of that. But superside and Martin, they are going a different approach. And I think also what the implications for talent acquisition and also how she hired 100 people on herself after joining Superside. Everything is in that episode. So quite insightful, in depth, and a lot of examples and practical knowledge what you can apply!

Hey, Marta, great to have you on my show now because we met in Milan at the people executive dinner, and there is also a connection to the podcast. Aki, one of your team members, is also a guest on the show, and I also worked with him previously at Tuxfix. And now the two of us are sitting here, and I’m looking forward to this episode. Maybe we can start with a short introduction about yourself.

Marta Bisisi:
Of course. First of all, thank you. Thank you, Thomas, for having me here. It was a very, very nice dinner in Milan. Yeah, I mean, I can introduce myself pretty quickly. I am today vp of talent at Superside. I lead the whole talent department. So from recruitment to people experience, I cover learning.

So everything that has to do with people and how we develop our people strategy is a little bit part of my responsibility today. About me I’m italian. First of all, I joined the super side four years ago, and I don’t come from a traditional HR talent people background. I was a management consultant before, so that was an interesting career move for me. I joined the superset four years ago when the company was quite different from what we are now. It was much, much smaller, and we had almost nothing on the people’s side of things. Very, very few things. And back then, I accepted the challenge of building this team. And to be honest, it’s been great. Very fun. Amazing. Four years.

Thomas Kohler:
And Marta, I think what is crazy, what you said to me as well at the dinner, I think you started at superside when you were around 100 people or so.

Marta Bisisi:
Yes, around 100 people.

Thomas Kohler:
And then the next hires. The next 100 hires, you did all by yourself.

Marta Bisisi:
Yeah, I think, you know, the first few months in super sad, right. When I joined, we. We quickly went through, you know, a strong wave of growth and had no team like the first recruiter in the team I hired, basically a year after. So the first, you know, around 100 hires were big effort on my side. I still remember my calendar was just interview after interview after interview. But back then, the company was growing very fast and we really needed to sustain that growth and give the company the capacity they needed through hiring. So, yeah.

Thomas Kohler:
And how did you organize yourself back then? Because I think a lot of people that are joining maybe a startup and then don’t know what to expect or maybe you just need to take on what’s, what’s now priority. Right. And while, absolutely, while delivering, trying to build a system around it, how did you organize yourself and hiring those people by yourself and then building out a team? Because I think that’s quite stunning.

Marta Bisisi:
Yeah. So I mean, there’s no, you know, secret sauce to say how do you build everything when you join a startup is going that fast, to be honest, is really going by priority. Ruthlessly prioritize what is the most important thing that has to be done. Right. And just say everything else is second priority. I won’t think about it. Right. So go buy priority and of course make sure you’re kind of, you know, leaving a little bit of space to unlock more things.

So back then I, you know, I managed the recruitment for my team as I was managing recruitment for the rest of the company. Right. One of the priority roles there. And as I was recruiting for project managers or creatives, I also recruited for my team. But my suggestion is really ruthlessly prioritize.

Thomas Kohler:
And how do you have a prioritization framework? Because to be honest, Martha, we are on the same page there. I also see it often with clients when especially on the startup side, there is the founder and they now buy a recruiting service like you get a recruiter from my team. Right. And then suddenly all problems are solved. No, of course not, because a lot of things needs to happen also on the company side. And the number one, I would say, solution to fix problems is prioritization. And not just prioritization, but also having certain implications of prioritization that the prioritization really implies certain action or does not implies other certain actions. Right. So what was your prioritization framework there?

Marta Bisisi:
Yeah, I think, you know, two things, right? One is very easily try to find that activity that is not only the most critical, urgent, but also that is going to unlock many more things. Right. So for example, for me it was, you know, recruit other recruiters and grow my team because that would unlock a lot of capacity to do more of what we needed back then. Right. So really think about when you, when you prioritize what you’re doing and what are the implications of what you’re not doing and make sure like they too kind of are coherent where you want to go. And so make sure that, you know, prioritize is something you are not completely blocking, you know, the ability to scale and stuff. And once you have that, stick to it. First of all, like, do not rediscuss it, at least for, you know, a week. Do it weekly. Right.

But the problem sometimes is when you kind of continuously rediscuss, what are the priorities? You end up not having priorities at all. So maybe do it once a week, decide what is the most important thing that needs to get unlocked and how this is gonna help you write a not to do list and just go with that.

Thomas Kohler:
And I think also, as you said, you clearly regularly need to communicate it also that everybody is aware.

Marta Bisisi:
Absolutely. I think what is the best thing is share. You know, this is my priority for the week. This is the most important thing I’m gonna do for the week, for the month, depending on, you know, how things move. I suggest not to have it more than one week. When you’re moving really, really fast, one week is already long enough. And clarify, this is things that I’m not doing, like intentionally not doing. And I think this is needed for people that work with you so they understand when you say no. Right.

But also for yourself, because it’s, you know, it’s always very tempting to say yes, but I can also do that thing. I can help here, I can help there, but this is gonna, you know, not help you really move on. So my suggestion is have that not to do list, make it visible for everybody and stick to it.

Thomas Kohler:
And in the setup where you started, supersight always was a fully remote company, right?

Marta Bisisi:
Absolutely. Since day one.

Thomas Kohler:
And what was the implication of being a fully remote company and hiring so many people in parallel? Didn’t you then maybe at some point also need to focus on certain talent pools in certain locations? Or did you just did a lot through inbound applications because you had a good brand, maybe. And what was the, what was the setup there in the context?

Marta Bisisi:
Yeah, absolutely. So a little bit of everything, what you mentioned. So, first of all, we usually tend to hire and back then to quiet. We’re quite agnostic in terms of location. It’s. We are, you know, we probably have, we have some limitations in terms of your time zone, depending on the role you have, but we’re quite against it. The truth is then, in reality, it’s very common to hiring kind of clusters geographically, either because you realize that there’s very, very good talent in that area for that specific skill you’re looking for, but also because then you start having referrals and you build communities there. So it’s a little bit easier to hire people where you already have a big presence because people refer their friends, refer ex colleagues, they talk about you.

And when you are remote, especially in 2020, now things are a little bit different. But back then, you need to build a lot of trust. It was not that common. So having people there that can talk about your company and say that you’re real, you’re actually hiring, you’re a good company. Helps recruiting. So that for sure was helpful. And again, you realize after you recruit for a while that there are specific pools that have great talent and you can recruit from, and you kind of start leveraging that. You start knowing the companies, etcetera.

Thomas Kohler:
In case you like my show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it. Do you remember or do you have it top of mind? What are your top talent pools are for certain functions, for instance, product managers, engineers.

Marta Bisisi:
Yeah. So engineers. I think in general, we hire quite a lot in Eastern Europe. Poland is a big, big country for that. Great talent there, for creatives. Right. We hire or sales people. We hire a lot in South Africa, great.

It really depends on the type of skill you’re looking for, and it gets just easier and easier. You start knowing the companies, you start knowing where the good people come from. Right. And again, the referral process is the best because you get into the country and then it’s the people there that tell you who are the great talents. So that helps, absolutely.

Inbound is also a good source. It’s a little bit more difficult, as all we know, right. To really recognize quality, but it’s also a way sometimes to enter new locations that you didn’t know that.

Thomas Kohler:
And what is your expansion model? Into a new country or into a new talent pool? When you’re talking about inbound, do you have a specific structure that you follow?

Marta Bisisi:
No, to be honest, we don’t. Inbound wise, it’s. We don’t have specific, you know, strategies. But for usually, you know, when we have. When we’re thinking about geographical reason in particular, the effort is on the outbound kind of process and outreach. So we try to identify who are potential companies that build have the same talent as we do. We do it with different tools. We use LinkedIn, we use website.

We interview people and try to learn from them. And that’s how you build a little bit of knowledge. And then we store all of that with our team. We make sure that these resources are available for everybody, and we start from there.

Thomas Kohler:
That’s often underrated, right? Sometimes it’s just a quick Google search of the top x companies in that field. And then you can also just get maybe a list of ten companies because there are a lot of, there’s a lot of content out there.

Marta Bisisi:
Absolutely. Then you can also look in.

Thomas Kohler:
Then you can also look into your applicant tracking system. Just filter for these ten brands to see. Okay, what are the candidates we already interviewed maybe or had in the process. And then we just do have a conversation and get information what other people maybe don’t or which is not available to everyone, just to us. And by using that information, I think it’s a bit like gold mining.

Marta Bisisi:
You can go into, I mean when you, when you enter, you know, a new country, new geography. Of course we do it right. Like you Google what are the top companies, you have to start somewhere, right? So that’s a good way. Well, before you Google now, you probably ask Chachi BT, but similar, right. You kind of try to figure out who are the companies, but then there are so many other things, right? Which if we think about tech, which is the tech stack that they use, how do they work, how they are organized, right. And this is stuff that it’s much more difficult to find online. So you figure out just talking to people and understanding and try to figure out which companies have a way of working that is more, you know, applicable to us, closer to us. Or sometimes you just want to, you know, steal something from it, right? Maybe you want to build a culture, like an engineering culture, a sales culture is similar to something in another company, right? So you, as you interview people, you learn more and more, you understand what you like. Maybe you understand also what you want to bring in.

Thomas Kohler:
Yeah. And I think there are also a lot of information out there really important for hiring or also for overall company wide decisions. What you cannot read from a profile or several profiles or a LinkedIn company profile or whatever it is, you sometimes just need to talk to people in a systematic way. Maybe then gather some information in, I would say questionnaire, like doing a bit of market research, and then you have data that you can make decisions on, right. So that’s, I think, valuable.

Marta Bisisi:
And the most important thing there, right, is make sure that your team and the recruitment team has a way to collect the information in a way that is as structured as possible. So I’m a big fan of, you know, having structured interview scorecards to collect the questions, ask, you know, always the same question to get, you know, similar answers. And you would be surprised how, you know, even, you know, people that work in the same company they are kind of influenced by the culture of that company and sometimes repeat the same answer multiple times. Right. And you say, okay, this must be true. Right. Like they phrased it in a similar way for many times. So all of that is very, very interesting, but it’s important to have tools that allow you to structurally collected information.

Thomas Kohler:
And what I was really interesting, interested about was when we were in this dinner room, we were talking about salaries and compensation frameworks. Right. And then you were very, I would say you have a very clear framework in place, what you built by yourself. And it was very, also logical. And I would like to dive into that a bit. So maybe you can share what the framework is you use for compensation also in a fully remote company in several countries where you have employees to also have some kind of equality. But I think that’s something that you could now dive into a bit.

Marta Bisisi:
Yeah, absolutely. I’m very passionate about this topic. It’s been a big topic for me in the past year. And as we were saying before, the first, a little bit of my time in supersight has been recruiting, recruiting, recruiting. And then at a certain point, we got to a size where we started to have to structure things and. Yeah, so building a career and compensation model was very important for us. And we started, beginning of last year, trying to build something that was querient for the whole company. Before that, it was a little bit more fragmented.

Each team was, you know, developing kind of their own rules. We wanted to make something a little bit more coherent. And we started really from scratch. And we, when we started, we tried to talk with a lot of remote companies, asking always the same question, like, how do you think about compensation? What’s your philosophy? How do you define composition of the remote environment? And every time we were, you know, it was me and my team, we were listening to these models. We felt like, you know, something was working very well, resonating very well with our. With what we thought, right. Our philosophy. And something was very, very far from what we needed. Right.

And at certain point, we realized that we probably had to build the super side model to this, something that was working for us and for our culture. And we kind of felt in line with the philosophy, but also was working for how we were set up. And in the end, we developed a model where that follows one simple rule, which I know might be very controversial, which is same salary for the same rule. So the main rule is if you have two people that do the same job, bring in the same competencies, have a similar background and stuff, and they work side by side and they are going to be paid the same no matter where they are located. So no matter if you are, you know, if I’m in Italy, you are in Germany, you are in South Africa, Colombia, Argentina, if you do the same job, you’re going to be paid the same. And the reason for that, I mean, the idea is that you’re bringing the same value to the company, right, performance being the same, but in general, you’re kind of bringing the same value to the company and there’s no reason why you should be paid differently. And I know, you know, a lot of other companies choose, you know, cost of living, type of, you know, remuneration structure.

What we thought back then is that since the whole all our company is building the same product, the same service, selling to the same customers, there was no reason why, right. Based on your location, your job should have been remunerated differently. So this was the main starting point for our compensation structure. So same job, same pay. And then we started trying to understand what does it mean, same job. So we understood that same job is not same title, but maybe is a cluster of title. Cluster of roles that bring in the same experience background are the same profile when you look for them in the market. So job families are not one to one with the teams, but sometimes you have a similar job family across multiple teams.

For example, if you have a marketing specialist, if this person works in the internal marketing team or the employer branding team, they’re probably kind of the same profile, right? They do different jobs, but they are the same profile. So the first exercise was to figure out what are those job families. In super psych, what roles were similar? We looked at how do we recruit for those roles? Are we looking for the same profiles or not? How people move in the company? Because if there is a lot of internal movement between two teams, what it tells me is that probably the kind of skills you need for those two roles are very close together. So probably they might be the same job family. So we did a little bit of this job of mapping, and then the second step was to realize, okay, if these are our roles, these are our job families, what is a target salary for those roles? Right? And again, I think we used in that, at that stage, I think you can use, you know, multiple sources and multiple ways of doing it. Back then, what we did was try to figure out where in the world we could find a type of talent and try to take a median salary for that role in that geographical region. Again, we didn’t go by country. We go by geographical regions and then.

Thomas Kohler:
Set them like North America, APEC mea or how. Exactly? 

Marta Bisisi:
Exactly. As you said, sometimes we were clustering it even more together, but that’s the area. And then we were looking for median salary in that region and say, okay, so with this salary we should be able to recruit most of the people in this region. We should be competitive.

Thomas Kohler:
You taught me that for Europe, Austria is even the median, right?

Marta Bisisi:
Yeah. I mean, what we did for Europe is we took all the countries, we tried to figure out what was the median salary across all the countries. And Austria was an amazing benchmark country and we used it for that. But again, this is, you know, something that it changes, right. Every time you update the model, you can choose a different country.

Thomas Kohler:
The logic, how do you, how do you maintain that model?

Marta Bisisi:
We review it. So there are two ways in which we do it. First of all, normally we tend to review the benchmarks once a year, but also we allowed our recruitment function to push for changes. So when they realize that salary are offering, specific setup that we are offering is not competitive anymore, that is usually the force that pushes us to review things. So we really use our recruitment function as the force that makes us realize if we are somehow completely out of market. Right? So we have two ways. One that is a little bit more structured and one that is reactive to what is happening in the market.

Thomas Kohler:
But I think that’s smart because I think ultimately you need a salary to hire people. And if you are limited in the salary of hiring people, because there is one model and a model is always a simplified version of reality, but never reality itself, right?

Marta Bisisi:
Absolutely.

Thomas Kohler:
Then sometimes it needs to be updated towards reality.

Marta Bisisi:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, that is, I believe, you know, that is a starting point. And then you have to, you know, realize how things are really in the market. Sometimes it also happens that you decide that you need the people in a specific geographical region to do that job. Right, which is not very common in superside, but sometimes it happens. Sometimes we have to build localized teams. And in that case, you might figure out that the salary you were offering is just not competitive anymore or just doesn’t work for that specific area. So in that case, you can update the model and the model is pretty flexible to allow you to do this.

The rules we set in place kind of allow you to adapt to what are the business needs while keeping strong motivation for how you do things and why you do things. I think the most important thing about compensation model is that you build it, which is amazing. But then you have to defend it, like, every day. Right. And you need to, you know, have strong rationale about your decisions, and you kind of need to really believe in it because, trust me, the most difficult part is not building it, is defending it. Right. With candidates, with hiring managers, with people inside the company. Like, explain what was the rationale and explain why you decided what you decided. Right.

So it’s important. It’s flexible enough to allow you to adapt to where the company’s going, but also you strongly believe in it.

Thomas Kohler:
Can you give an example of where you could successfully defend it and maybe not successfully defend it?

Marta Bisisi:
I think so far we did pretty well. No, I mean, sometimes it happens that, you know, in the process of defining job families, when you do it kind of in vitro and in your team, you really believe two teams are kind of the same talent. Right. And then when you really discuss with the hiring manager, so you really look at that, that is not the case. Like, it happened a couple times with a couple roles we have in the company, I had a very strong opinion about why they should have been the same job family. But after a while, after discussing with the main hiring manager in that team, I realized it was not. And the good thing about the model is that it allowed us to adapt very quickly.

Thomas Kohler:
And how did you realize that there was maybe the job family not, or the job group not in the job family?

Marta Bisisi:
Simply, we had to relook at what were the competencies and what were the profiles we were hiring for those people, and we realized that even if they looked similar, maybe, but there were some competencies and some skills that were required in one role that were not in the other, and those made the role simply not comparable anymore. We were asking for additional skills that were not there in the second role, so we really had to adapt. So I had to give up or update the model multiple times based on feedback that I received. So, I mean, I think it’s always a conversation, right? The moment you build a framework, then it’s a discussion about how you fit the reality into that. But yes, I mean, multiple times I convinced the person I had in front of me that that was the right decision, that it was the right job family, that we assigned it correctly. But also, a lot of times change my mind and I say, okay, maybe it’s not right. I think what is important is building something, like the structure needs to be something that people believe in. Right.

And then the details of is that job in that job family or in another one is something that should be easy enough to update and rediscuss when things change. Not also because maybe you said it at a certain point in the history of your company, and then the strategy for a team changes. What we want to do with a specific type of talent changes. Maybe we want them to be slightly different. We are coaching them in a different direction, and this makes the role slightly different. And you need to have the freedom to update that.

Thomas Kohler:
In case you have any feedback or anything you want to share with me, please send me an email on thomasseoplewise.com or hit me up on LinkedIn. And in case you really enjoy the show, please subscribe. I would really appreciate it. Cool. And now when you look into the future, how do you think needs, how do you need to adapt the model that it’s still very relevant?

Marta Bisisi:
Good question. So I really believe in iterative approaches. You never build something and it’s going to be like that forever. I think if I look at our model going forward, for sure, we’ll need to recurrently look at targets, make sure that they are relevant, make sure that the job families are relevant as we go. Probably we’ll also have to in the future, update our leveling systems, allow for more as the company grows so that you are not blocked by your own structure. Will probably, you know, I expect we’ll need to reduce our geographical, you know, regions, right. As the world goes in a direction where probably salaries are a little more similar, remote work is helping in that direction. Probably having job families will become less and, sorry, having geo regions will become less and less relevant or just different, I think.

Thomas Kohler:
Are there any regions where you don’t hire at all in certain functions because your model just doesn’t allow it?

Marta Bisisi:
Yeah, absolutely. Like San Francisco Bay Area is an extremely expensive region, and we believe we can find amazing talent somewhere else too. Right? We can find them. So in some cases, we say the same talent can be found in different geographical regions, maybe some regions that are a little bit less. I mean, where people wouldn’t expect to find that type of talent, right? Well, we know, and we go there and we try to find it. And I think it’s also part of our mission. Right? Like the goal is to create equal opportunities worldwide, and it’s part of our, you know, mission to show that you can find amazing, amazing talent everywhere. You don’t have to go, you know, where everybody goes because it’s easier. Right.

A little bit of the job of my recruitment team is find those road diamonds that live maybe not in the most common and most expected geo regions. You’re going to find amazing creatives, amazing project managers, amazing engineers. You can find them everywhere if you have a good way of assessing their value, their talent, and also you are curious enough to open up to other. To other areas. Sometimes it’s very easy to try to simplify the recruitment process and say, hey, we’re going to find this type of talent for sure in this jew area. Let’s not even go outside. Let’s just go there higher. And that’s it.

Well, I think it’s also part of our mission to try and say, okay, let’s see where this can be found. Let’s try to see if this talent is somewhere else and why not giving opportunities to other people. Right. If you work from Italy. Right. And you still have a big chance of working with big customers in the San Francisco Bay area. So that’s a big opportunity for everybody. I think it’s part of our mission to also allow.

Thomas Kohler:
And is it also possible for some listeners if they have some questions regarding your model? Because I think that’s always a hot topic, that they reach out to you and ask questions.

Marta Bisisi:
Absolutely. I could talk about it for hours. What works, what doesn’t. Right. What I suggest. So, yeah, absolutely. They can reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Thomas Kohler:
LinkedIn, yes, we have it in the show notes. Yeah, that’s already the end of the episode. So, Marta, thank you so much. It was really a pleasure talking about conversation with you on talent acquisition and looking forward to see you soon somewhere.

Marta Bisisi:
Yes. Thank you. Have a great day. Bye.