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ISSUE 15 · AI + COMPENSATION

A NOTE FROM GIAC

Six months into building Range, I still check job ads regularly.

I read them to see how AI is reshaping work in comp and total rewards. They give me food for thought on the questions that bother me most days. What am I actually doing, and who decides what my job is this week? Underneath it sits an apocalyptic feeling that if I stop, everything will vanish.

Over 400 people have applied to Range and only 15 founding seats are left in the community. This newsletter, which I started in June, now reaches over 2,000 of you. The demand is there, but as a solopreneur you constantly feel you're jumping off the top of a cliff.

I never built a business or a community before, and comp and total rewards people aren't the biggest networkers (let’s be honest). Most of us sit in small teams, and our domain tends to be quite insulated.

There's another side to it. I choose what I work on, how and when, and today that's from Sicily.

I also get to learn from genuinely smart and good people, the founding members of Range.

The job ads show me how AI is reshaping our work. Inside Range, I watch leaders help each other build the skills that don't exist yet. Nilan, this week's guest, turned one of those skills into ten questions you can score your own pay process against.

I hope you enjoy this week's edition.
Giac

FROM A MIRAGE OF SPREADSHEETS TO ONE BUDGET MODEL

Nilan Vagh works in People Systems at Zip. Earlier this year his rewards lead, who was covering a parental leave and running her first cycle at Zip, asked their pay review vendor whether it could run budget scenarios she could take to the board. It couldn't. So Nilan built a budget model in Google Apps Script, with comp positioning feeding straight into the scenarios and every change kept in an audit trail.

He through the tool on a fictional 250 person company, from the heat map to the audit trail, and talks about what he wants to build next.

Listen to the episode →

GRAB NILAN’S SCORECARD

Before writing a single prompt, Nilan went through previous cycles and the mirage of spreadsheets from last time, and mapped the workflow. ChatGPT and Codex sped the build up, but the business logic came from his own desktop analysis.

He's also written up how he decides whether a process is ready for any of this, as a scorecard. It asks ten questions about your own process and scores each one 0, 1 or 2, from whether you can say what problem you're solving to whether a decision can be explained afterwards.

A zero on your data, on where a human has to decide, or on how exceptions get reviewed means you're not ready for AI, whatever your total says.

ON THE RADAR

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