For startups looking to hire new talent, a one-time decision about pay for each new employee coming on board isn’t enough. Building a consistent philosophy around compensation is critical to a company’s long-term consistency and transparency for employees — essentially getting the “why” and “how” behind pay decisions.
In today’s job market, where layoffs and hiring are rampant, getting your compensation strategy right is even more important, Rani Mavram, CEO of HR tech startup Complete, told TechCrunch in an interview.
“Even though companies are hiring for smaller roles, the need to get that senior right is increasing,” Mavram said.
Complete aims to help companies, especially early-stage startups, conceptualize and implement a firm-wide compensation strategy that reflects cash, equity, bonuses and benefits.
Screenshots of the completed compensation strategy platform Image Credits: complete
“We will work with them [questions like], are you going to make negotiable offers or non-negotiable offers? Are you going to give your candidate more options when thinking about raises and bonuses? Is that a performance related thing or are you going to do it by default for everyone? So we sort them through these broad compensation categories and then help them connect with what’s right for their company,” Mavram explained.
Complete offers interactive offer letters to candidates working at client companies and recently launched a similar product to help employees understand what their total compensation will include, Mavram said.
Mavram co-founded Complete with CTO Zach Field last year and took the company through Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort. Mavram worked on the product team at Google, while Field’s background was in engineering at various late-stage startups, including Uber and Opendoor, the pair told TechCrunch.
Mavram has seen her team grow rapidly at Google and navigate the challenges of getting the “compensation narrative” right.
“After I left Google, I was trying to think more about whether the Googles of the world were experiencing this pain, what would this initial startup look like to start this conversation for the first time?” Mav also crawled.
Field, for his part, said he has become a go-to source among his colleagues for information on how to help equity compensation, as he has seen his employers go from private to public and ultimately done a lot of research on the topic.
“For some of our first-tier customers, they don’t even have a structured hierarchy — like they don’t have one software engineer versus two software engineers. And that’s one level of education that you can share back with employees as you develop that philosophy. What we’re really focused on is how your data integrity compensation is built, or I’d say total rewards,” Mavram said.
The company announced that it has raised $4 million in seed funding led by Accel. Other participants in the raise include Y Combinator as well as angel investors from Clm, Opendoor and Stripe, according to Complete.
It is far from the only startup working on eliminating compensation decisions. Series A startup OpenComp has a similar product designed for high-growth companies looking to improve recruiting and retention, while YC-backed campus seeks to help tech workers understand their own compensation.
“Compensation is one of the ways that individuals can build trust in their employers,” Mavram said. Companies that are proactive about compensation decisions and prioritize transparency can use their compensation strategy to gain a competitive edge, he said.
Mavram said he fully hopes to further expand support for administrative tasks with new hires.
Often with young startups, founders themselves are the ones thinking through decisions about how much equity to give new hires, so Complete’s product aims to help them understand how different avenues can impact their business and capitalization. Complete currently focuses on helping companies establish the rationale behind their compensation decisions, although ultimately companies can still choose which pieces of information they want to share with their employees.
Mavram said she hopes to expand Complete’s five-person team by bringing on additional engineering and design hires to help the company meet new customer needs. Complete works with Vercel and DataStax as well as early stage companies like Convex and TrueNorth. Although Mavram Complete declined to share how many clients it serves, a company spokesperson said it has analyzed several thousand salaries.
“Long term, I hope every company has a compensation philosophy, or [knows] What does mavram mean? “I hope it looks like success for us, every company that we work with, or more broadly, in the startup space, one of them on their website, on their careers page or next to their privacy policy, and what it means to think about it,” he said.
