Compensation Lead

Leads employee compensation programs to ensure pay practices are competitive, equitable, and aligned with organizational objectives. Owns salary structure, job classification standards, financial modeling, and end-to-end administration of merit and bonus cycles. Develops compensation policy and partners with senior HR and Finance leadership on compensation decisions. Sets reporting standards, designs training, and leads process improvement across the function.

• Leads participation in external compensation surveys, resolves job matching discrepancies, and recommends competitive positioning strategy across pay levels.
• Owns the company's salary structure, determining changes to pay grades and range spread/midpoints and presenting them for approval.
• Reviews and approves job classifications, resolves escalated classification decisions, and establishes classification standards for the team.
• Oversees the integrity of job and pay records within the HRIS and establishes audit protocols to prevent errors, duplicates, and classification inconsistencies.
• Analyzes compensation data across the organization to identify systemic pay equity or compression issues and recommends corrective action plans.
• Reviews and resolves escalated compensation requests and establishes guidelines for how requests are evaluated.
• Owns the financial models used to project the cost of merit, market, and promotional guidelines, and presents recommendations directly to senior HR and Finance leadership.
• Leads the merit and bonus planning cycle end-to-end, designs manager guidelines and audit protocols, and resolves discrepancies between planned and actual compensation expenditure with Finance.
• Defines the compensation reporting standards used across the function and presents analyses directly to senior leadership.
• Develops and owns compensation policies, procedures, and program guidelines, and determines the policy response to new federal and state compensation regulations.
• Designs the training curriculum on compensation cycles and pay administration and delivers sessions to senior HR and business stakeholders.
• Leads process improvement initiatives across compensation workflows, standardizing and automating job pricing, merit cycle, and reporting processes.

Requirements: 

• Bachelor's degree in Human Resources, Business Administration, Finance, Economics, or a related field; or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Progressive experience in compensation analysis, salary administration, job analysis/evaluation, and market pricing, including experience presenting to senior leadership.
• Experience with human capital management system, compensation management system, spreadsheet software with advanced functions (e.g., nested lookup functions and pivot tables), market pricing data aggregation software, and business intelligence or reporting tools.
• Certified Compensation Professional (CCP) designation preferred.