Compa, a Newport Beach HR-focused tech company, recently launched a pay transparency law map to its menu of compensation-related offerings, and said the new feature helped doubled its site’s web traffic to 3,000 viewers in a week.
“We developed it as a free resource for recruiters,” co-founder and CEO Charlie Franklin told the Business Journal. “Because their world is getting impacted pretty substantially by these new laws.”
It’s a new feature from Compa, whose software automates the compensation research process and helps recruiters at large enterprises make competitive job offers, according to officials.
The company’s clients include LinkedIn, Nvidia Corp. (Nasdaq: NVDA) and DoorDash Inc. (NYSE: DASH). It has raised over $4 million to date.
New Laws
California’s new pay transparency law went into effect this year. The law requires employers with 15 or more workers to list salary ranges for job postings on the company’s site and on third-party job boards. Businesses are also required to provide pay scales to current employees, upon request.
Other areas in the country with pay transparency laws that are incoming or already in effect include Washington, Rhode Island and New York. Pay transparency legislation is also pending in Massachusetts and South Carolina.
Franklin and his team believe “it’s inevitable that most of the country will go transparent,” since “compensation decisions are shifting from secretive and discretionary to open and accountable.”
“We’re already observing that with large employers, regardless of where they’re based,” Franklin said, citing Microsoft Corp.’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) recent decision to disclose salary ranges for all job postings in the U.S.
Compa also practices what it preaches, featuring a salary range on its job posting for a senior software engineer.
‘Wild West’ Recruiting
Franklin founded Compa in 2020 after more than a decade of working in HR and compensation. He started as a compensation consultant at consulting firm Mercer and eventually worked his way up to the head of HR M&A and global mobility at financial and human capital management firm Workday Inc. (Nasdaq: WDAY).
While working in the industry, he learned that making pay decisions for existing employees was much more structured than those made by recruiters for new employees.
“Recruiting is like the Wild West,” he said. “If a recruiter wakes up on one side of the bed, your pay is $100,000. If they wake up on the other side of the bed, your pay is $110,000.
“There was this mismatch between the tools and software available for internal compensation decisions versus those that recruiters use to make offers to job candidates. That’s why I founded Compa.”
