Four people pinged me this week asking about their upcoming job offers–what’s a good offer?  It’s true, I’m happy to chat with executive candidates about their offers.  Chairing a comp committee gives me a unique vantage point to think about compensation but so does our practice.

Let’s face it, salary in the professional ranks is a hush-hush topic and most managers like it that way.  Everyone wants to know, is this a good offer, how do I know?

The truth is, salary is all over the map across companies.  Companies have different risk-reward profiles, enjoy different profit margins and growth, are in different points in their life cycle and have different tools through which they compensate.

And, everyone’s value to a company is different.

I’m not a fan of the “Radford” style compensation studies for low to middle management.  If you were ever in a big company and listened to one of those presentations about how someone mapped jobs with a target group of companies and, channeling Dilbert, you heard ‘we pay in the top 75th percentile”, well, you know what I mean.  Salary.com and other ‘self help’ tools are in the same boat.

Here’s why–these studies map job titles and maybe job descriptions.

As we move to an increasingly ‘pay for performance’ world, the top performers earn more.

I’ll explore just how much more in future post.