Insights
Compensation strategy, industry analysis, and CompTech news from the Novo Insights team.
SalaryTalent: Right Diagnosis, Ambitious Prescription
For 27 years, Salary.com has been one of the default answers to a very specific question: what should we pay for this job? As of this week, it would also like to answer who should we hire, how did they do, and who's covering Tuesday's second shift.
September 28, 2026
Webinar Replay: Incentives, Do You Get What You Pay For?
Sales commissions, executive LTI, and the annual bonus. Three plans, one word: "incentive." So why do they behave nothing alike?
August 13, 2026
Webinar Replay: Comp Cycle Showdown: Debating the Design Decisions that Define Your Program
Paul Reiman and Kathryn Gombos recently went head-to-head to tackle both sides of a debate on key annual cycle decisions.
April 10, 2026
Pay Transparency Doesn't Live in a Silo. The Market Just Proved It.
Trusaic and Syndio each announced major strategic partnerships on the same day, signaling that pay transparency compliance requires a connected ecosystem of job architecture, analytics, and systems integration rather than any single tool or one-time audit.
March 18, 2026
Webinar Replay: Pay Transparency - Planning For Now and Looking Ahead
Paul Reiman and Artila Metaliaj recently discussed the history of pay transparency and offered insights into the challenges companies are facing as they prepare for the EUPTD.
March 5, 2026
Pay Transparency Has Changed. Technology is Catching Up
Discover how evolving regulations and rising expectations are transforming pay transparency from a periodic task into a continuous operation, and how modern technology is stepping in to meet these new demands.
February 5, 2026
Unpacking the WTW and Bettercomp Partnership: What it Really Signals
An analysis of the WTW and Bettercomp partnership and what it signals about the growing trend toward specialization and integration in the CompTech landscape.
January 13, 2026
Nobody Cares About How Many Grades You Have
The number of grades in your compensation structure is invisible to everyone except comp professionals. What employees and leaders actually care about is whether the structure is fair, clear, and easy to use.
January 13, 2026
From Charts to Clarity: Why Payscale Compass Is a Meaningful Step Forward
A review of Payscale Compass and how it advances compensation analytics from raw data to actionable insight.
December 19, 2025
Nobody Cares About Your Average Compa-Ratio
Average compa-ratios make compensation look tidy on paper while masking the real story. What actually matters is the distribution, the outliers, and how individual employees experience their pay.
November 12, 2025
ADP Acquires Pequity: Proof of the Pattern and a Test of What Comes Next
ADP's acquisition of Pequity highlights the rapid consolidation in the compensation tech space, aiming to enhance strategic compensation planning and decision-making capabilities.
October 29, 2025
Nobody Cares When You Say Compensation Is “An Art and a Science” (and that’s not true anyway)
"Compensation is an art and a science" is a comfortable dodge that lets comp pros avoid explaining their reasoning. The real discipline is knowing how to blend statistics, psychology, economics, finance, and organizational behavior.
October 28, 2025
Intelligent Pay Gets a New Name: Syndi
Syndio rebrands Intelligent Pay to Syndi, aiming to revolutionize compensation with adaptive decision intelligence and contextual pay guidance. Read how Syndi positions itself as the future of pay decision-making.
October 27, 2025
Nobody Cares About Cost of Living vs Cost of Labor
The difference between the cost of labor and the cost of living, and why honest communication about pay matters more than jargon.
October 23, 2025
Sales Compensation is a Team Sport: Define Team Roles to Maximize Impact
Maximize your sales compensation impact through clear team roles and collaboration. Learn how structured stewardship drives better plans, stronger partnerships, and greater business growth.
October 7, 2025
Extending Compensation’s Reach: Introducing the “Offer Guidance” Category in CompTech
An introduction to Offer Guidance, a new CompTech category using AI to extend compensation's influence into real-time offer decisions for greater pay equity.
September 26, 2025
Payscale Acquires Datapeople: Compensation Meets Talent Acquisition
Payscale's acquisition of Datapeople aims to streamline compensation and talent acquisition workflows, enhancing job management, pay transparency, and market benchmarking accuracy.
September 16, 2025
Compa Frontline: Needed Innovation for Location-Sensitive Roles
Discover how Compa Frontline provides real-time compensation insights for location-sensitive roles, addressing dynamic labor market needs with hyper-localized data.
July 29, 2025
Why More Consolidation is Coming to the Cycle Management Category
Discover why the compensation and cycle management tech sector is set for more consolidation and what it means for HR teams.
July 7, 2025BetterComp Raising New Capital
BetterComp secures new funding, indicating strong momentum and investor confidence, likely aimed at market expansion and strategic growth within the CompTech landscape.
June 25, 2025
Introducing the Novo Insights CompTech Category Assessments: Your Shortcut to Smarter CompTech Decisions
Discover our Novo Insights CompTech Category Assessment reports to streamline your tech decisions with in-depth vendor analysis and practical planning advice. Ideal for compensation professionals.
May 14, 2025
Pay Transparency: A Means to an End
Discover how strategic pay transparency can build trust and drive business performance without sacrificing employee comfort or creating unintended consequences.
March 20, 2025
Understanding Pay Mix vs. Pay at Risk in Sales Compensation
Learn the key differences between pay mix and pay at risk in sales compensation to optimize motivation and performance in your sales team.
February 25, 2025
Asking for More: Tips for Getting More Heads and Dollars
Tips for compensation leaders on securing additional resources by framing needs strategically, showcasing ROI, and exploring alternatives to headcount for enhanced team effectiveness.
November 15, 2024Pave Partners with Greenhouse to Provide Offer-Based Insights
Discover how Pave's new Offer Insights product, in partnership with Greenhouse, revolutionizes offer-based compensation market intelligence. Explore the impact on compensation management and market trends.
July 12, 2024Compa Expands From Offer Intelligence to Real-Time Benchmarks
Compa expands into real-time benchmarks with Compa Benchmarks and Compa Stock Intelligence, revolutionizing compensation market intelligence for enterprise technology companies. Discover the future of compensation data.
July 12, 2024
Benchmarking Your Benchmarks: A Guide to Evaluating Compensation Market Data
A guide to evaluating compensation market data, focusing on metrics, samples, methods, tools, and value. Learn how to choose the best benchmarks for your organization.
July 8, 2024
The Big Challenge With Small Compensation Teams
Discover how small compensation teams can optimize their efficiency and impact with strategic planning and tailored strategies. Learn key insights and recommendations to enhance your compensation function.
March 4, 2024
Creating Global Compensation Alignment With a New Compensation Structure
Learn how Novo Insights helped a software company create a harmonized compensation framework to address market challenges and ensure pay equity.
March 4, 2024
The Ship Has Sailed: Compensation Benchmarking Leaves the Safe Harbor
An article clarifying why real-time compensation benchmarking data isn't illegal, despite falling outside traditional Safe Harbor guidelines.
January 26, 2024
Creating a Job and Compensation Structure to Align Global Talent
Job architecture and compensation structure become imperative to navigate global organizations and ensure consistent compensation competitiveness.
January 18, 2024CompTool Launches Capabilities to Make Survey Management Easier (and maybe even free)
CompTool's new survey marketplace lets compensation teams browse, buy, and integrate market pricing data in one place, with free benchmarking capabilities that make it a cost-effective starting point for organizations building out their market pricing practice.
January 15, 2024
How Long Does It Take a Rep to Ramp?
Understanding the new hire ramp-up period is crucial for optimizing sales performance. Learn how to evaluate the duration, persistence of under-performance, and predictive metrics in this data-driven approach.
January 15, 2024
Who Pays At The 25th Percentile?
An article explaining why most companies pay some employees at the 25th percentile, whether by design or as a natural result of salary structures, and why below-median pay can be a legitimate strategy.
December 15, 2023
Six Types of Market Data
Not all compensation market data is created equal. This piece breaks down six distinct data types from traditional surveys to self-reported sources, helping comp teams understand the tradeoffs and build a smarter portfolio approach to benchmarking.
November 13, 2023
Understanding the CompTech Domain
Compensation Technology Domain: Linking tech choices to key processes, and categorizing key software providers and vendors into relevant categories
October 31, 2023
The Secret Sauce: Compensation Strategies to Fuel Retention in High Turnover Service Industries
A compensation recipe to help combat turnover and keep your workforce engaged.
September 22, 2023
Don't Be Left Behind: Embrace AI and Expand Your Impact
A guide for HR and compensation professionals on embracing AI by becoming AI-literate, identifying automation-resistant work, and investing in uniquely human skills like communication, data storytelling, and behavioral science.
September 21, 2023Pave Expands Market Management Offering
Pave's move to support third party survey data is a practical acknowledgment that comp professionals still trust traditional surveys, and it positions Pave as a more complete platform while adding another competitor to an already crowded market management space.
July 27, 2023
Why Don't People Use My Dashboard?
Building a great people analytics dashboard means nothing if nobody uses it. This piece breaks down the five most common reasons dashboard utilization falls flat and what to do instead.
May 26, 2023
Is Your Compensation Team Understaffed?
Research on how compensation functions are staffed, timed to a moment when pay transparency is putting comp teams under more pressure than ever.
May 8, 2023
Make This Deal Work: Integration Strategies That Maximize Deal Value
Most M&A deals fail to deliver their promised value, and weak people integration is a core reason. This piece gives HR teams a practical framework for tying their integration strategy directly to the deal thesis.
May 1, 2023
Challenge the Robot: Critical Questions to Ask Your AI Tech Provider
Arms HR leaders with five essential questions to vet AI-powered people tech vendors covering data sourcing, privacy, model transparency, and bias. It's a practical checklist for making smarter, more ethical decisions when adopting AI in HR.
April 10, 2023
Enable People Analytics with Thoughtful People Data Management
An overview of why a thoughtful people data management strategy is essential for enabling effective people analytics as HR technology continues to expand and fragment.
March 24, 2023
Pay Transparency is Here: How to Make it Work
A guide to embracing pay transparency by refining compensation philosophies, modernizing pay structures, and advancing fair pay practices.
March 20, 2023
Measure the Success of Your Annual Compensation Cycle
A guide to evaluating compensation cycle success through five key metrics: budget adherence, performance differentiation, market alignment, promotion meaningfulness, and pay equity.
February 6, 2023
The Compensation Business Review
An article introducing the Compensation Business Review (CBR) as a structured, recurring process that helps compensation teams shift from reactive to proactive by delivering ongoing insights and owning the pay agenda with business leaders.
February 4, 2023
Machine Learning For Non-Data People
A beginner-friendly overview of machine learning, covering its types, real-world uses, risks, and data requirements.
December 16, 2022
How To Measure Quality of Hire
Efficiency metrics like time to fill and cost per hire matter, but without measuring hire quality they incentivize the wrong outcomes. Two simple metrics fix this: whether new hires perform and whether they stay.
December 12, 2022
How the Compensation Function Needs to Change
The compensation profession is overdue for a reset. This piece makes the case for five meaningful shifts comp teams need to make to keep pace with a world shaped by pay transparency, flexible work, and rising employee expectations.
December 1, 2022
Around the Web: November 2022
A monthly roundup of resources the Novo Insights team found worth sharing, covering pay transparency updates, remote work research, people analytics, and tools for communicating data and models more effectively.
November 29, 2022
Make a Bigger Impact With the Information You Have
A review outlining a four-stage framework for turning HR data into business impact by addressing common gaps in information, insight, ideas, and implementation.
November 9, 2022Around the Web: October 2022
A monthly roundup of resources worth reading, covering pay transparency legislation, workforce productivity research, compensation benchmarking debates, and people analytics tools and metrics.
October 31, 2022
Key Metrics: Time to Fill
Measuring time to fill is more nuanced than most organizations realize, and this piece breaks down the full exit to fill cycle into seven distinct time periods to give comp and TA teams a clearer, more actionable view of recruitment performance.
October 15, 2022
People Metrics That Matter
A practical framework for identifying the HR metrics that actually matter, organized across nine categories with clear guidance on what to measure, how often to review it, and how to connect it to real business outcomes.
October 3, 2022
Key Metric: Comparable Employee Pay Progression
Merit budgets only tell part of the pay increase story. This piece introduces Comparable Employee Pay Progression, a metric that captures the full rate of compensation growth employees experience over time including promotions, adjustments, and off-cycle increases.
September 30, 2022
Pay for Performance: The Big Picture
A case for evaluating pay-for-performance systems over a multi-year lens rather than point-in-time decisions, introducing the concept of Comparable Employee Pay Progression to better assess whether compensation truly rewards top talent over time.
September 30, 2022
The MAIN Idea: Framing Investments in Reducing Attrition
A framework for connecting comp and rewards investments to attrition reduction in a way that resonates with business leaders.
September 21, 2022
Do You Need To Pay More?
A four-part framework for assessing compensation competitiveness beyond anecdotal benchmarks.
September 8, 2022
Attrition is Expensive - But How Expensive Is It?
Generic attrition cost benchmarks rarely hold up to CFO scrutiny. This piece breaks down the true cost of employee attrition across five distinct components so organizations can build a defensible, customized calculation for their own workforce.
September 6, 2022
Wages and Inflation: Chicken and Egg
As inflation rates are high and labor markets are tight, it's a bit difficult to keep straight what is a cause and what is an effect.
May 24, 2022