Head of People, Harry Elkington, shares his thoughts on what senior experienced talent need to know when considering a move within the current market.

My background lies primarily in talent acquisition both domestically and internationally having worked for the UK and the US. That’s been at both experienced and at graduate level. I think the hiring plan for us here is always going to be organic growth as culturally that’s best for the business. But I think the strategic acquisition is helping us grow in beath of sector and subsector specificity as well.

So contrary to what a rec-to-rec or internal recruiter would usually be saying, I actually don’t think people should move. I think that if you’re being fairly remunerated and you’ve got a good track to equity then you should stay with that business and realise the long term benefits, but if either of those things aren’t in place from a remuneration perspective or a shares perspective that’s when people should be looking elsewhere.

So, what does fair remuneration actually look like? Well, it’s comprised of 3 things; base salary, commission and PNL or management override. Typically, base salary is negotiable dependant on level and dependant on revenue generation. You can’t bill 300K a year and expect a 150K base salary but in the same breath if you’ve got a team that’s billing 3million there’s going to be sway on what you can ask for on the base salary level which would usually coincide with a threshold on commission. I think at the senior level people should be expecting around 30% give or take. Then from a PNL or management override perspective between 5-10% of team performance after a threshold is typical. If you’re not seeing any of those things then I’d say that maybe you’re not being remunerated in the most fair way.

So another reason that we find senior people would make a move inside the market is because of equity or shares. We’ve found that a lot of businesses are intentionally vague when it comes to remunerating people at the senior level particularly in relation to equity. This can obviously be quite dangerous if you’re looking to spend 10+ years with a business.

What we’re doing which is slightly different here at H&P is we’re remunerating people from an EMI scheme as opposed to long term. So you will get paid out for each year that you’re a part of the lock step internally, as opposed to just seeing a payout in 10 or 15 years. So there’s a lot less risk associated with being an equity partner here at H&P.

So if you’d like to understand more about the market just from a remuneration perspective or how equity works in more detail or what the EMI scheme looks like here at H&P then please feel free to reach out.