Throughout 2024, Pave mined our real-time compensation database to uncover trends from among our 8,500+ customers and 1,000,000+ employee records. The most interesting findings were shared on the Pave Data Lab blog.
Matt Schulman, Founder & CEO of Pave, posted many of those same compensation data trends to his LinkedIn profile, and seeded conversations among his engaged audience there. In this recap, we’re looking back on the insights that gathered the most likes from the LinkedIn audience.
Here are the top stories of 2024 as judged by you, our compensation community.
1. How Wide Should Your Salary Ranges Be?
The benchmarks around salary range width informed the most popular Pave Data Lab post of 2024. This topic sparked a great conversation among compensation professionals on LinkedIn—check out the post to see the comments.
Pave’s analysis found that the most common salary range width among analyzed companies was 30%, which means +/- 15% from the midpoint. Companies with narrower salary ranges aspirationally have more control over cost and pay equity management, but tend to end up with more employees falling outside of range.
Explore the full salary range width blog post for more, including factors to consider when determining the correct salary range width for your company.
2. Pay for Performance vs Pay Equity
Pay for performance was trending in 2024, so it comes as no surprise that insights on this topic would be high on the list. We explored data from H1 merit cycles conducted in Pave’s compensation planning tool to understand whether companies were leaning more into pay for performance, or opting to maintain tighter pay equity within job levels.
After grouping employees into four categories (Promoted, Above Expectations, Meets Expectations, and Below Expectations), our analysis found that the median raise benchmark delta for Above Expectations vs Meets Expectations was notably small: 5.3% vs 4.0%. Given the increased attention on pay for performance in recent years, one would expect more differentiation for top performers. After all, don’t top performers drive more than a +1.3% impact on their company’s growth?
Explore this pay-for-performance blog post for additional details, and join the conversation on LinkedIn.
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3. How Many HRBPs Should Your Company Have?
Another area of data insights that was popular in 2024 was org chart benchmarks. In the third spot on this list, we have a post that explored the ratio of full-time employees (FTEs) to HRBPs within companies in Pave’s dataset.
The analysis showed that the average HRBP covers more FTEs as companies get larger, with 300 FTEs per HRBP at companies with 3,001+ employees. It’s worth noting that the findings lean heavily towards the tech sector due to the makeup of Pave’s dataset, and other industries may have ratios that diverge from the tech benchmarks.
How does your company’s FTE-to-HRBP ratio compare to the benchmarks? Read the HRBP blog post or check out Matt’s LinkedIn post for more.
4. Who Should Your HR Leader Report To?
On a very related note, the next most popular post was also on the topic of HR org chart benchmarks—specifically the reporting structure of HR leadership. Matt wondered: Is it a red flag if a company’s Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) doesn’t report directly to the CEO?
According to the analysis from Pave’s dataset, the answer may be yes. We found that about 80% of People/HR leaders report to the CEO at seed-stage companies, and about 85-90% report to the CEO at later stage companies with 1,000+ employees.
Check out the blog post for additional insights, including data on CHRO compensation (both cash and equity), and head over to LinkedIn to see what the community had to say.
5. What the Heck is “Head of”?
Rounding out the top five most popular posts of 2024 is another org chart question. With this analysis, we aimed to clear up the confusion around what the “Head of” title actually means when it comes to job level.
The findings show that employees with “Head of” titles are most commonly leveled at the M5 or M6 level, which typically maps to Director or Senior Director. But whether companies opt to use the “Head of” title, and how they choose to level them, is a question of compensation philosophy.
Are titles like “Head of” a cheap and easy way to entice top talent to sign on? Or are they just a path to a messy org chart with inflated titles?
Of course, the LinkedIn comments are full of interesting opinions on the matter! On the blog, we dive even deeper and explore base salary benchmarks for “Head of” compared with their Director and VP counterparts.
Explore More Data in 2025
We’re looking forward to uncovering even more compensation data insights to share with the total rewards community in 2025.
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