Pay-Transparency Readiness Director

The mandate

A therapeutic-biotechnology group has expanded through acquisitions, leaving research titles, grades and pay ranges that cannot be compared across countries. Recruiters disclose ranges inconsistently, manager explanations rely on “market” without evidence and promotion criteria differ among laboratories. The people risk council needs operational readiness for greater pay transparency while preserving employee privacy and legitimate differences in scarce scientific work.

The twelve-week deliverable is a job-and-pay evidence baseline, disclosure operating model and prioritised remediation roadmap. Milestone one establishes population, jurisdiction and decision scope in week three; milestone two tests comparable work, ranges and progression in week six; milestone three designs employee and candidate processes in week nine; milestone four provides country playbooks, control ownership, cost scenarios and executive approval choices.

The client will provide employee and candidate pay data, jobs, grades, range structures, promotion and hiring decisions, working patterns, locations, collective terms, recruitment templates, demographic fields approved for use and HR-system constraints. Acceptance requires population and range reconciliation, sampled comparable-work groups to reproduce, disclosure processes to show named evidence and internal reward staff to run a new-hire and employee-request case unaided.

Consultants will not provide legal advice, determine unlawful pay, disclose identifiable employee information beyond authorised reviewers, set individual salaries, negotiate collective terms or configure HR systems. Country counsel owns interpretation and management owns workforce decisions. The team will identify process and evidence gaps, while unresolved legal or privacy questions remain explicitly attributed rather than converted into design assumptions.

Outputs will distinguish job value, market movement, employee contribution, scarce-skill treatment, location practice and unexplained discretion. The roadmap must sequence data, job architecture, recruitment, manager capability, employee response and governance rather than treat reporting as the whole change. Country implementation, employee litigation and system build after week twelve are outside this engagement.

Why this is external work

Legacy reward teams use locally coherent practices that do not form one comparable evidence system. Internal counsel can interpret requirements, but the company lacks capacity to rebuild job and pay processes before the annual cycle. Outside reward specialists provide neutral comparison and operating design without assuming legal or individual-pay authority.

What you will own

• Reconcile jobs, employees, candidates, grades, ranges, work locations and reward elements across the in-scope countries.
• Test comparable-work groupings through accountability, skill, effort, conditions and organisational context rather than title matching.
• Examine range construction, hiring position, progression, promotion, market premium and manager discretion for explainable evidence.
• Design candidate disclosure, employee information request, manager response, record retention and escalation processes by jurisdiction.
• Quantify remediation priorities across missing architecture, outlier pay, narrow cohorts, process control and system limitation.
• Create governance linking reward, recruiting, HR operations, privacy, counsel, employee relations and accountable business leaders.
• Deliver the baseline, comparison method, disclosure playbooks, control matrix, cost cases and sequenced readiness roadmap.

Candidate qualifications

• Led multi-country pay-transparency readiness spanning job architecture, recruitment, employee requests and reward governance.
• Built comparable-work methods for scientific and technical populations whose local titles and career paths differed materially.
• Distinguished defensible market, location, progression and performance effects from unsupported manager discretion.
• Designed privacy-controlled evidence processes without issuing legal conclusions or exposing identifiable employee comparisons.
• Worked with country counsel and employee representatives while retaining one coherent enterprise reward architecture.
• Left internal reward and recruiting teams able to execute candidate and employee cases using accepted controls.

Non-negotiables

• Can complete four Copenhagen-led country workshops and executive approval materials within twelve weeks.
• Will disclose relationships with reward vendors, recruiting platforms, biotech competitors, counsel and employee organisations.
• Brings operational pay-transparency delivery across multiple countries; public reporting analysis alone is insufficient.
• Accepts no authority over legal interpretation, individual pay, collective negotiation, employee disclosure or system configuration.

1. 49 words maximum. Describe a comparable-work grouping you changed after job evidence contradicted titles or grades.
2. 49 words maximum. Which client data must reconcile before an employee pay-information process can be trusted?
3. 49 words maximum. How would you separate legitimate scientific-skill premiums from unsupported pay discretion?