Mathilde Fontaine, People Operations Team Lead at Welcome to the Jungle

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Industry: Employment - Recruitment

Countries: France and Czech Republic

Number of Employees: 330 collaborators, with 38% of them in full remote CDI positions

Year of Establishment: 2015

Business Overview: A job search platform for candidates, solutions for companies to enhance their employer brand, and a media platform covering the world of work.

How Welcome to the Jungle developed their salary bands with Figures

# The Company's HR Context

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Mathilde Fontaine holds the position of People Operations Team Lead at Welcome to the Jungle. She manages a team of 3 individuals and is primarily responsible for the company's Compensation & Benefits strategy.

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Before 2023, the company had not formalized its compensation strategy. The decision was made to create salary bands. However, before embarking on this task, the People Ops team first focused on establishing its compensation philosophy: "We needed to lay the foundation for our compensation policy first: how do we want to reward our employees? Based on what values? How do we want to position ourselves in the market?" explains Mathilde Fontaine.

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"Implementing a salary policy and frameworks makes the topic of compensation much less emotional."

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# The Challenge

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The development of the salary policy had to address two key challenges:

• Facilitating the application of the company culture through compensation.
• Ensuring the alignment of our teams within the salary frameworks to guarantee equitable treatment.
• Providing transparency to managers and employees.

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For Mathilde Fontaine, "establishing a compensation policy means creating a framework that combines our People's ambitions for attractiveness and talent retention while managing the financial impact on the company. Finding the right balance among all these factors took time."

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# The process with Figures

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The creation of the salary policy was made possible by a collaborative effort: "We conducted brainstorming sessions with Noëlla Gavier, HR Director, and Jérémy Clédat, CEO and co-founder of Welcome to the Jungle. We also interviewed various members of the Comex, including Camille Fauran, the company's CEO. Naturally, we also worked with our finance team.

We have chosen to base our compensation policy on our corporate values, to create salary bands that apply to everyone, regardless of qualifications, and that value the impact and performance of individuals and teams. In addition to compensation, a wide range of benefits (4-day week, telecommuting/flex remote policy, parenthood charter, etc.) are designed to ensure that employees enjoy a healthy work-life balance. 

After this stage, Mathilde Fontaine drafted the salary policy methodology for employees: "The idea was to create a reference document explaining the rationale behind the salary bands."

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Mathilde Fontaine then set about creating the salary bands with Figures: "Once we had set our policy, Figures enabled us to establish our concepts. She particularly appreciated Figures' ease of use and the support offered at every stage of the process: "We already had a Career Path and job descriptions in place. So it was easy to map our different jobs in Figures. The solution also helped us to ask ourselves the right questions, step by step. In particular, advice was given on granularity and salary ranges, which was very interesting. I couldn't have done the exercise without it. I also drew a lot of inspiration from the Notion pages created by Figures on compensation policy."

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Figures' Salary Bands module

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"I found the support offered by Figures to be very qualitative and meticulous. The team and the solution adapt to each stage of development, which is very reassuring."

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The managers were then trained in WTTJ's compensation policy, and in the concepts associated with notions of compensation. They then had access to their teams' pay grids, as individual contributors and managers. She adds: "It was important not just to share the pay scales with them as they were, but also to explain what they meant in relation to the market. Figures makes our positioning in relation to the market very visual and easy to explain".

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# The benefits of the Figures solution

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A few months after the introduction of Salary Bands via Figures, the initial results have been very positive for Welcome to the Jungle: "Our employees were looking for greater transparency on pay. Sometimes they didn't understand what it was based on. Creating our pay policy, and then our salary bands, reassured them, and enabled them to ensure that pay was consistent for all team members, whether newcomers or those who had been with the company for several years". 

In addition, the creation of salary bands via Figures simplifies the updating of employee data whenever there is a change, as this is now done automatically via integration with their Lucca HRIS. This automation greatly facilitates the work of the HR team, enabling them to share this sensitive information with managers in complete confidence. Conversations are more constructive, as they are based on reliable data that is as close to the market as possible.

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For the time being, Welcome to the Jungle has chosen to make its pay scales anonymous, but this has not prevented the first managers with whom we deployed the scales from getting to grips with the solution: "The pay scales have been very well received by our managers. The visualisation provided by Figures makes them easy to understand.

Figures Salary Bands module

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The People team now uses them at several stages of the employee experience: 

During recruitment 

Salary bands make it possible to offer candidates an appropriate and competitive salary package.

Although Welcome to the Jungle does not yet display salaries in its job offers, the People team provides its candidates with the salary range to be applied for each job opening. In this way, employees and candidates benefit from visibility right from the start of the recruitment process.

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In the event of internal mobility 

Thanks to the salary bands, employees can anticipate their possible development within the company, whether they decide to become a manager or not: "For us, employees don't need to be promoted or manage a team to get a raise. They can evolve as individual contributors, stay in the same position for several years and see their salary grow as a result of their performance and expertise", explains Mathilde Fontaine.

Over the long term, this strategy helps to engage talent and build loyalty.

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During salary reviews 

Welcome to the Jungle organises Performance Review campaigns that can trigger salary reviews twice a year. The salary review will be based in particular on the positioning of employees on the grids, with a single methodology for the company. 

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For Mathilde Fontaine, the salary grids should serve as a compass: "We're going to use this data as the basis for all our decisions. We are confident in our methodology, which reassures our employees."

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# Next steps

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Over the next few months, Welcome to the Jungle's People team will continue to work closely with its managers on salary bands.

They will share their pay scales with employees, highlighting the notion of compa-ratio, and will use this concept to calculate any pay gaps between positions, with a proactive policy to reduce and eventually eliminate them.

Mathilde Fontaine will also be setting up training courses dedicated to the company's pay policy, aimed at all managers.

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