The early days of the pandemic brought Daasity success and momentum. After securing its seed funding, the company launched on Shopify and quickly became one of the platform’s top apps for data analytics.
As the company planned to raise its Series A, Dawn Raagas, Daasity’s VP of People Ops, knew that potential investors would scrutinize its financial plan, which was effectively its headcount plan. She also recognized that pay consistency and equity were critical for successful growth.
Wanting to apply Daasity’s focus on data-driven decision-making to its compensation programs, Raagas was determined to make the company’s hiring and pay practices more strategic and scalable.
After a search for public comp data revealed stale information without useful filters, Raagas says she “realized that approach wasn’t going to work. We needed reliable comp data and compensation software with an end-to-end suite of tools to help us make sense of it.” On a trusted peer’s referral, Raagas signed up for OpenComp.
“My colleague sang praises of OpenComp’s compensation software and comp tools. It gave me the confidence that this compensation software platform was built to scale businesses like ours. OpenComp gave us one reliable source for comp data and the compensation software to use it.”
Daasity worked with OpenComp’s platform and compensation experts to build a scalable compensation system from the ground up – ultimately uniting the executive team, delivering pay equity, streamlining recruiting, and setting the company up for retention.
After attending an OpenComp webinar on the topic, Raagas was able to craft a succinct, informative comp philosophy that helped the Daasity leadership team discuss location strategy, differences in levels, and how to structure their organization’s headcount and compensation plan. Daasity investors were so impressed that several of them used it as a template for their other portfolio companies.
“OpenComp helped us create a philosophy that featured the necessary components without getting overly complicated or verbose. It laid out how we would pay employees and why, and the compensation software handled it all.”
Raagas’ next priority was to build out the company’s pay strategy based on their newly developed comp philosophy. Using OpenComp’s Global Comp Data, powered by HRIS-integrated data intake and advanced AI/ML comp data indexing and normalization, she could “weigh the value of hires against the cost” with just the click of a button. She was also able to use the suite of comp tools, which allowed her to sidestep tedious, manual spreadsheets and replace them with a fully integrated system. Specifically, Headcount Planning positioned her to compare and contrast different scaling situations in a fraction of the time – with exponentially more accuracy and insight.
“It’s an understatement to say OpenComp was a critical piece to building out those models. If it weren’t for OpenComp, I would’ve been pulling my hair out trying to use spreadsheets. If it wasn’t for OpenComp, it would’ve been so much more challenging.”
Once implemented, Daasity’s pay strategy fueled the company’s recruiting efforts. In Q1 of the following year, Daasity grew by 75%, with 90% of offers accepted with zero negotiation – a figure Raagas attributes to a hyper-accurate hiring model based on the most up-to-date comp data available. A fair, data-driven, and streamlined strategy also bolstered the company’s financial plan and ability to retain top performers during the market downturn around the same time.
“We’re lucky to have found and implemented these solutions when we did. Having reliable systems in place in the face of a recession gave us peace of mind and a huge competitive advantage.”
Finally, developing a pay strategy with data-informed salary ranges allowed Daasity to apply its commitment to pay transparency and progress toward pay equity for all employees.
“As leaders, we want to make sure the compensation we’re offering is equitable. Creating a compensation philosophy with levels and salary ranges helped us make good on our pay transparency goal.”
.svg)