As Vendr scaled rapidly to roughly 400 employees, the organization had outgrown its informal approach to compensation, leveling, performance, and rewards. Without a formal framework, the company faced growing pay inequity, inconsistent promotion decisions, and leaders who lacked a basis for making hiring, performance, or talent decisions. This created risk both for employee trust and for the company's ability to scale its people practices sustainably.
As Head of People, I owned with the team the end-to-end design and rollout of a comprehensive compensation and leveling overhaul. I partnered directly with the CEO and C-suite to establish the company's compensation philosophy, then led an 8-week project to build a formal leveling framework from the ground up. I transitioned the company from an insufficient external benchmarking tool to a consolidated compensation partner, built out wage program ranges that incorporated equity considerations, and developed a pay transparency strategy. In parallel, I revamped the benefits portfolio to better align cost and value. Before launch, I trained all leaders and managers across two dedicated sessions to ensure they understood and could confidently apply the new framework, then rolled out a redesigned annual and mid-year performance review process in Lattice.
The results were significant and measurable within just two quarters: we closed identified pay gaps for 95% of flagged employees, cut benefits costs by 25%, and saw a marked rise in manager confidence around compensation and promotion decisions, as reflected in post-training surveys. Voluntary regrettable turnover in key roles also declined as employees gained clearer visibility into growth paths and engaged in more substantive career development conversations with their managers; turning a fragmented, ad hoc system into a scalable, equitable foundation for talent decisions.