Hi!

I was in this position before, and a ladder didn’t help. They assigned someone a senior title when he and I were doing precisely the same job. In fact, I was more senior in that I lead a small team, and had been doing the job description for a long time. I saw the job description online for the new hire which is what sparked my discussion with management.

It was a case where I had been hired at a non-competitive rate and the firm had been trying to advance me, given HR constraints, over various years, but they just couldn’t match the salary of a new hire from a firm paying market wages.

I still bear a grudge about this, even though they “fixed” it for me after about six months of back and forth.

Request to companies: pay people a consistent salary commensurate with the responsibilities the employees are taking on, which are clearly defined and part of a ladder like this author suggests. I have yet to read the full article, but I definitely will.

If you don’t feel like you can pay people equally based on specific job roles, you should not be leading a company. Forget concepts like retention.

As soon as I found out my former employer did this d*ck move, the people involved lost all credibility.

You don’t want to lose all credibility with your staff.