Andrea Derler, PhD 
North Carolina, which is the new tech hub in the east, on the east coast, I should say.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:05
Yeah, it new tech hubs for the world.

Andrea Derler, PhD 0:08
Well, let’s let’s keep it to the east. For now.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:12
How long have you been there? Were you ever in Canada? Are you always been?

Andrea Derler, PhD 0:17
We used to live in Michigan before and we’ve moved to North Carolina about seven years ago. But I am originally from Austria. So I’m basically imigrated maybe 15 years ago into the US.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:29
Oh, wow. Do you like do you like Raleigh?

Andrea Derler, PhD 0:32
I like Raleigh. It’s very peaceful. It feels really like laid back. And it’s quite diverse, which I like. And big. It’s all spread out widely. There’s lots of trees, lots of trees, lots of big parks. So that’s beautiful. I like I like nature.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:50
Yeah, but you know, it’s funny. We just moved, we lived. So I’ve typically lived in a city or a suburb of a city where it’s been pretty tight. But we just recently moved in May, I guess, outside of Austin, Texas, about 20-30 minutes outside. And it’s kind of in the it’s kind of in the country. I mean, we’re in a neighborhood but there there are big lots and it’s there’s a lot of nature, but like there’s not a morning we don’t wake up to like a dozen deer in the front yard.

Andrea Derler, PhD 1:17
Beautiful.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:17
Yeah. So when I’m with you, I like the trees and the quiet.

Andrea Derler, PhD 1:20
Yes. And Austin is of course, the tech hub are one of the tech hubs, I should say.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:25
That’s what they say the price of living here certainly validates that.

Andrea Derler, PhD 1:29
Reflects that, I’ve heard I’ve heard.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:34
Alright are you ready to jump in?

Andrea Derler, PhD 1:37
Yes, sir.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:38
All right. Let’s do it.

CXR Announcer 1:40
Welcome to the CXR channel, our premier podcast for Talent Acquisition and Talent Management. Listen in as the CXR community discusses a wide range of topics focused on attracting, engaging and retaining the best talent. We’re glad you’re here.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:54
All right, hi, howdy and hello, welcome everybody to the recruiting community podcast where we’re meeting each week with a recruiting leader and industry expert, or a personality to talk about what’s top of mind for them. And within our career crossroads community of now over 5000 recruiting professionals if you didn’t already know. CXR is a community of TA pros from around the world and organizations that on average, hire between 2000-200,000 people a year each. And where we work to connect with those leaders and practitioners both live and online, to talk about what’s keeping them up at night, big victories, big defeats, what’s ahead and what they’re working on. So this show streams mostly live on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and of course cxr.works/podcast. And that’s also where you’ll find the archive of hundreds of our previous episodes. And where you can tune in actually to find out who’s ahead right, who’s ahead who’s next on the slate. So if you’re joining us live on any of our social channels, we remind you, you can actually be part of the show, it’s super easy. Drop a comment, or a question during our broadcast into the chat, and we’ll do our best to pull you up on stage and address your submission. Now, you’re also invited to drop in any social profile links that you have you want to share, to sort of expand your network and meet with other listeners. So don’t be shy on either of those fronts. Now, we recognize that our community of listeners are working. So we do our best to keep the show relatively short. And we can do that because we don’t have any sponsors or supportive posts or comments. That means that if we’re talking about something cool or a hot topic, it’s because we think it’s cool or that it’s a hot topic and that you might want to know about it, not because somebody paid us or paid us to ask you to even check it out. So with that, I’m pleased to introduce our guest for the next 20 minutes or so, Dr. Andrea Derler. Andrea is the principal research and value over at Visier because you’re obviously being one of the most recognized leaders in people analytics and data. I want to welcome you to the show. Dr. Andrea, how are you?

Andrea Derler, PhD 4:15
Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everybody. Good afternoon, everyone. It’s great to be here. Please call me Andrea.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 4:21
Not Dr. Andrea. You just just Andrea.

Andrea Derler, PhD 4:24
Plenty.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 4:26
I would go by Dr. Chris, if I was a doctor if I had a Ph.D.

Andrea Derler, PhD 4:30
No you wouldn’t

Chris Hoyt, CXR 4:31
did. Yep. For those who may not know you, Andrea, why don’t why don’t you kind of give us an escalator pitch like who is Andrea? Like? Like, why should we care what you have to say today?

Andrea Derler, PhD 4:47
Thank you, Chris. Well, I described myself as I studied the humans behind the data thing. That’s That’s my slogan. What I mean by that is Viziers community data is 15 million in employee record strong. And I have the big pleasure of working with a team of data scientists to really see what are the behavioral trends of employees of workers in these data? And so we can answer questions such as, is the great resignation actually true? Or are people more hiring internally versus externally? Or what did I do for you know, gender pay equity, for example? So I study humans behind data, if you remember that you know a lot about me.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 5:31
Well, I love that. So are you going to you’re going to tell us that quiet quitting is not really a thing. And we can ask, we can all stop paying attention to that. Right? That’s going to be our headline.

Andrea Derler, PhD 5:43
I think it is a thing. It’s an interesting discussion, but it’s probably more of a discussion that we were looking for over the summer, whilst we’re looking for the next big story. The quiet quitting is an interesting component, because it’s sometimes divided into the generational differences. You know, some people think this only applies to the young people. But they’ve traditionally always have a relatively bad reputation. They’re leaving earlier, they’re, you know, changing jobs much quicker. But I think this is a burnout issue more than anything, we’re just really done with working 80 hour weeks, we’ve done with being the powerless little employees. So quite quitting really refers to to really a trend to say, no, I’ll need my work life balance. I do want to do good work. But now we have a certain hour in the week. And that’s it.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 6:30
It’s kind of the next generational headline battle, because it happened. I mean, it happens every so often, right? Gen Xers this boomers that so now we have the quiet quitting, and the quiet hiring and the quiet firing. And it’s all it’s all a little bit of a mess. It’s not it’s not why we asked you to come in today to to catch up with us. But it is kind of an interesting headline a topic of discussion. That’s kind of fascinating.

Andrea Derler, PhD 6:55
It reflects certainly a big shift, change and shift in how employees, you know, have a relationship with their employers and their companies. Traditionally, you know, employees workers used to be the powerless many. But I think the last 10 years and technology certainly helped. We’ve become the emancipated employees. We have more information about our companies about our data, go to Glassdoor go to you know, fishbowl. We can comment we can make demands. We can say we don’t want to work from the office, we actually want to work from home. If everybody always listens, that’s a different question. But I think the voice of the employees must louder now I’m quite quitting could be part of that.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 7:34
Yeah. All right. Well, so let’s talk about you’re talking about stuff that’s going on the last, you know, X amount of years, let’s let’s jump into pay transparency. Right. And I want to talk to you, I think you’ve got some stuff you’re gonna share with us today. But my question for you, I guess, is Andrea, what do you think like, how is the issue of pay transparency really changed in just the last two or three years?

Andrea Derler, PhD 7:58
It fascinates me that the pay transparency conversation really starts with a conversation on transparency itself. So that came up when the pandemic started. And organizational leaders were not always really transparent of how the pandemic would affect employees, right? It was very hard for them, they are very uncertain in many ways. And so that demand for we need to know more like how does the pandemic affect my job, my role was clear in some organizations who did it really well. But wasn’t so clear in others. So just really interested in also, the need for certainty was very prevalent during the pandemic. The pay transparency printed topic then came up because, of course, people have, you know, began to talk about their own wages, that was spurred again, by the fact that we know the talent markets hot, do new employees really always earn more than others, like the ones who have been with the company for a long time. So that topic led into I actually want to know what I’m going to earn, I actually want to know, what’s my potential in the next role. And so it’s, it’s multifaceted. It reflects, again, a change in attitude in terms of now I want to know, please, company, tell me now, where will I be? What role will I play? How much will it be paid? So it’s a whole shift that that really certainly intensified over the last few years.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 9:16
Yea it is interesting because I do remember conversations years ago, not not too many years ago with people who were saying, like the best, the best way to beat a 3% annual increase if you were lucky. If you were an exceeds expectation, maybe you got a 3% and best way to beat that’s just leave go somewhere else and get a 20% pay hike.

Andrea Derler, PhD 9:36
We found in our newest research on Boomerang employees, right? We hired those who come back like they resign, go someplace else come back, actually have an average pay increase of 20 to 25%. Compare that to the in our database 5% that we found for those who stayed. So huge differences now, and that spurs a lot of conversations again, around transparency, but also around like at what value does an employee bring as they’re being retained by the company versus those who are being like, the new flashy external hires? So big discussions there.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 10:09
Yeah. And Andrea Do you think organizations are getting smarter or more savvy around this transparency? Because I will tell you, we’ve got about 130 member companies and organizations or they’re typically, you know, by and large and enterprise sized organizations. And they were not happy initially with Indeed, throwing estimated pay ranges on their job postings, not happy because typically it was off, or they weren’t ready or 800 reasons of politics internally that that leaders were having to deal with and wrestle with like, what what’s it look like, from your end of all of that data? From an employer standpoint? Are they getting smarter? Are they getting savvy? Are they just saying, fine, screw it? Here’s the salary, let’s go.

Andrea Derler, PhD 10:51
I think that really depends on the culture of the organization. There’s not any one statement that we can make across organizations or industries. Mercer research tells us that only 17% of organizations actually practice pay transparency I’ve seen weird examples of companies who are who are open about the job posting and give a range of 80,000 to $230,000.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 11:13
So it’s your at risk, small range inside that band. That’s quite a pay scale.

Andrea Derler, PhD 11:18
Exactly. So it’s not really helping. But I think there is a lot of implications for managers, hiring managers, and how to have that conversation. But it’s also a cultural thing. It goes back to again, how transparent do we want to be as an organization across various topics, not just transparency in terms of pay, but also transparency in terms of our di efforts? And how open are we to talk about those numbers that we have in our company? And what are we doing about them?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 11:45
What do you think that culture is currently the biggest challenge around the topic of pay transparency at the moment? Or would you would you assign that to something else?

Andrea Derler, PhD 11:57
I mean, culture is always an issue, if things don’t go so well. And currently, because we had so many shifts in workforces also leaders started to, you know, resign more often manager turnover is higher. And so that always is disruptive for any particular culture. I do believe it is certainly a matter of in a commitment to a certain cause. If the senior leadership determines we do want to be more transparent, because we know going to be a talent magnet for the top talent. And transparency helps. That’s something that it needs to decide, but strategically and helping those hiring managers actually deal with it everyday in those everyday conversations.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 12:33
Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s and that’s, you know, it’s easy to say it’s no small feat to sort of be in the trenches and have those conversations at the leadership level. But you guys, Andrea, I want to call out you guys over at Visier are doing some research, you’ve just published a report, do you want to do want to share a little bit about I think I have it on the screen, I can throw it up? If you want to share a little bit about what’s within that. Pay transparency secret? Should it be a secret report you’re working on?

Andrea Derler, PhD 12:56
Happy to and certainly not a secret report and thank you for sharing that.

The report itself is not a secret?

It was based on the survey. And thank you, for all of you who download this report. Of course, it’s a free report, we wanted to know how interested are employees out there actually in pay trancparency. Do they want to know? And we found that the overall they do want to know, there is a generational gap. So we found that younger generations are even more keen on wanting to understand what their peers make in terms of salary versus them. So there’s a generational difference in terms of know that this has to do with history. You know, when I was really young, you wouldn’t talk about your personal salary, you just wouldn’t. What we find interesting, though, for this audience certainly is that when in the application process, 50% of candidates have actually withdrawn themselves from consideration when they learned the salary later on. So I wonder how much time we could save our talent acquisition professionals and our hiring managers in terms of get should we really go there, even if the candidate doesn’t even know the salary. So in terms of efficiency, it could be helpful to be more transparent at the outset to, you know, have a salary range, not one of $150,000 but posted somewhere. So we found that I mean, one thing I want to mention is that it is for certain populations much harder to know the salaries in their organizations. Women traditionally have been less informed about salary ranges. We don’t know really why that is yet maybe again, a cultural or maybe industry component there. So we do want to certainly open up knowledge and information to wider populations of candidates of applicants of employees.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 14:41
Yeah, it’s interesting to me I mean, you talk about I remember back when you were literally told not to talk about your sound like it was it was punishable. Like there were repercussions if you were found to be talking about your salary. I look back now and that’s, that’s so silly. Like I get from an employer standpoint, that fear of like, well, I paid so and so. this and I paid so and so that, but if we can’t have the conversation on why we paid somebody what we paid them, it brings the whole the whole process, you know, under scrutiny under question.

Andrea Derler, PhD 15:11
I agree, I think it actually is a function of us having a really hard time sometimes determining what value an employee can bring, and how we measure performance. If we’re not clear about what mean, what it means to be showing up as an employee who delivers is productive, is engaged, it’s really hard to pin down and compare and actually say, well, that’s really brings value to the organization. I think that’s one of the reasons why this is so difficult that many organizations are still struggling with setting those goals being really clear about expectations for the role. And then they add, you know, into the mix, not talking about salary so much or even your right, sometimes, you know, not permitting employees to do that. And that doesn’t help in being clear if that clearly tells me as an employee, how I can add value, and how I’m going to be compensated for that.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 16:00
Yeah, for sure. Are you? Are you seeing anything in your research? I know what what we see is is more of a high level and oftentimes anecdotal when we talk to our leaders. But are you seeing anything in your research the there is a shift coming in these organizations that are posting jobs that say they’re giving the salary or they’re posting a job at saying in all in all states except the state or only in this state to try to skirt some of the requirements to list salary in like New York City, for instance, or other states that have adopted that?

Andrea Derler, PhD 16:33
We don’t have any I think it’s too early to tell this is a recent movement, I would say we’ll probably have to wait another year or so to really do a proper research into the field in terms of has there been a difference being made? There are certainly benefits of higher transparency, we are hoping that certainly certain populations will have more, again, transparency into the roles and have more knowledge and be able to negotiate their roles better. There’s obviously also the concern around pay compression, again, popping up for transparency, right? If you have to in a hotel market, you don’t have to pay a little bit more for for new hires. Otherwise, you just struggling to hire at all. What this is due to existing house. We talked about this just before? I think it’s too early to tell. I mean, me as a researcher, I’ll always tell you, let’s wait a little and then research. Sorry.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 17:24
Yeah, no, it’s all good. I mean, one of the things that, you know, when this early days, years ago, when this really started to come up and garner a lot of attention, one of the questions that, you know, Jerry and I were asking was like, Well, if you are bullish on sharing, like if you’re in the recruiting organization, you’re bullish on sort of sharing what these rates of pay, are these pay bands in your roles, how are you handling the equity, the internal equity issue, right, that you that you sort of mentioned, and we’ve seen some organizations do an annual equity analysis internally and give people bumps to try to keep them competitive markets, but a lot of organizations and I think it was, well, we’ll call him out, because I’m not sure I’m remembering at the moment. Right now. I’m on my second cup of coffee. So my memories, not yet. But there were some organizations saying, look, it’s gonna take us six years to get internal equity to that front, right. And so I’m wondering if, you know, a lot of organizations are still struggling with that, where they’re kind of just, you know, doing that lowest common denominator thing and trying to ride this out to really see where it goes. Are you seeing are you seeing anything on that front?

Andrea Derler, PhD 18:27
Yes, I’ve observed a couple of companies and one of them is actually out there publicly. So I can mention them is Barilla. They worked on pay equity for four years. They were really, really keen on actually creating page and equity peak pay equity for between trends and ethnicities in the US. And they did achieve that. But it was very data informed process. It took a lot of commitment from the senior leaders in the organization who said we really want to do this, we don’t want in an unequal pay. Again, it call it calls for lots of conversations around what does what value and how can we determine value and don’t just go by job role and position but really understand how somebody in maybe in a lower role even can provide enormous value, and really should not be suffer off inequities in terms of their pay. But it usually takes a very data oriented data informed and very committed effort throughout the organization, not just HR, this does not just sit in HR, they sit to the business, because there is clear business value. So there are examples slowly popping up that we’re learning about. But again, if you admit to that there is an issue. That’s the first step to do that. Do we see pay inequity in our organization across levels? And you need data to do that?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 19:45
Yeah, and I do think that some organizations and leaders who’ve really gone all in on this are beginning to see a competitive advantage, right? There’s a differentiator because people know what to expect, and to be able to account for such a significant percentage of people drop and out of the Apply process or the interview phase, once they understand the pay range, I think it’s got to be pretty telling to the organizations who are suffering from that right there drop off is shifted to where a different part of that conversation is taking, and whose time did they waste, you know, outside of their own right. And then they’re hiring managers in the interview process, you know, keeping that a secret?

Andrea Derler, PhD 20:20
I think that’s part of it. At the beginning, Chris, were talking about like, where’s this conversation actually coming from and the transparency starts with about the role. We’ve seen this boomerang trend where people leave organizations go to a different company are really upset and frustrated at their new company, and then come back, that’s a really an interesting phenomenon. And this tells us that it’s not just about pay, because usually they are getting paid more in this other company. So it’s more about what do I expect from you? How do you, you know, how will you be able to provide value to our organization? How do we onboard you? How do we really care for you and want to engage you? So the conversation around transparency goes wider than just pay pays a critical part, but I feel it’s more on clarity, of role of engagement of expectations, that really plays a big role?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 21:10
Yeah, I think that’s fair. Look, Andrea, let me ask you, we asked everybody, as we sort of start to wrap up the show. If you were going to author and somebody surprised me last time by telling me they are authoring a book. But if you are going to author a book, around this topic of transparency and the trends that you’re seeing today, what would you what would you title that book?

Andrea Derler, PhD 21:32
It would be around the matter of transparency. Let me think about that good title, I will probably send me provocative such as, Why don’t you just tell them?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 21:42
Okay, I like that, Why don’t you just stop? Alright, so who gets the first signed copy of your book? Why don’t you just tell?

Andrea Derler, PhD 21:51
Well, obviously, it’s gonna be you Chris.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 21:54
No one every gives me the first book! Thank you.

Andrea Derler, PhD 21:59
Of course

Chris Hoyt, CXR 21:59
Well, it’s very generous of you. It’s very nice of you like, Andrea, we are super, super pleased to have you on the show. Thank you so much for the time, I know you’ve got a super busy schedule, and we appreciate you making time to connect with us and sort of share a little bit. We threw your LinkedIn profile up there, if anybody wants anything to connect with you. Obviously, it’s easy to do on LinkedIn. And then I think we also did the hello.visier.com/pay-transparency. I gotta look, I’m cheating, pay debts, transparency, that links in the chat. And we also throw that up on the screen if they want more information. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’m gonna I’m gonna put you in the greenroom. Is that okay?

Andrea Derler, PhD 22:33
And thank you, it was a great conversation.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 22:36
We’re glad you’re we’re gonna we look forward to having you back, hang out. Don’t go anywhere yet. I’m just gonna bump you for a second. All right, I’m gonna throw this up on the screen for everybody really quickly, just to walk you through that. Obviously, this is what’s happened today. But I just want to let you know, if you go to CXR.works/events. You can see what’s coming next. We’ve got an operations meeting coming up. Now. That’s tomorrow. And that’s for our members, where we’re talking about recruiting operations, all things going on behind the scenes, the muscle of talent acquisition, as we like to say, we have a Women in Leadership session coming up. We’re super excited about this. We do these once a month part of our lectures. Some are open to alumni. Obviously, some are open just to our members, but we do those monthly and coming up. We’re super excited leadership secrets of the world’s most successful women. And then of course, right behind that got a couple of more. Maury Hannigan is a Solution Spotlight for our members talking about Spark start following that on the podcast coming up on the 27th we got our own Rob Dromgoole, who’s going to talk to us about high volume recruiting. And then of course on September 28, we’ve got our EMEA q3 community meeting, you are not going to want to miss that if you are a CXR member and I gotta tell you what I’m feeling generous today. So if you’re a CXR member, and you’re coming to the EMEA recruiting member, we’re gonna let you bring a friend. So go ahead and sign up, bring somebody in, bring a plus one, they don’t have to be a member, and we’ll welcome them in for that meeting. It’s about a 45 minute call where we’re talking about what’s Top of Mind outside of North America primarily over the EMEA and the work that’s going on there. And until then, we’re gonna see everybody next week. Don’t forget CXR.works/podcast.

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