The pay gap is real, my friends. Hired, the career marketplace that produces studies about pay inequality, spent $2 million in 2016 to close its wage gap across gender, race and sexual identity. Since then, Hired says it reassessed pay six months later, and followed the same methodology in 2017. The company says it plans to do it again this year.
It’s worth noting that Salesforce, which employs 25,000 employees or so, spent $3 million in one year to close its gender pay gap. In total, Salesforce has spent about $6 million to close the gender and racial pay gap since 2015. Hired, in contrast, employed only 200 people at the time, and had to give raises to 60 percent of its employees. Half of those employees were women.
“This is because we didn’t have a hiring and compensation model in place early on, not unlike many fast growing start ups,” Hired SVP of People Kelli Dragovich wrote in a blog post. “We tended to pay people based on what they asked for in the hiring process and what their previous salary was, instead of their objective market value. Now, we base our compensation decisions on third-party salary data that takes skillset, years of experience, geographic location, industry and company size into account.”
Moving forward, Dragovich says Hired intends to continue cross-checking wages with market salary data and analyzing employee salaries. Today, Hired pays women more money than men in three of the company’s four core functions of engineering, marketing, talent advocacy and sales.
“By sharing our own journey, we hope that more companies will understand that they too can be part of the solution,” Dragovich wrote.