Yes! We have multiple frameworks that have evolved over time. Broadly speaking, we aim for internal consistency and consistency against what the market pays.
(Tom & I spent a good 45mins talking through all of this and doing a Q&A at our all-company meeting last week so this is a very very short and high-level version of how we do it)
We look at the role the person will be doing - how much skill/experience is required, how much ownership and impact they’ll have, and what level of seniority it is. We calibrate against external salaries (how much they’d get paid someone else) and internal salaries (how much people in equivalent roles here get paid). And then we make a reasonable, sensible, well-informed judgement call.
In practice this means that, internally, two people doing the same role get paid the same amount. Experience factors in a bit, but is not the main decider. Often you see requirements like “five years experience” on a job ad and that’s quite a lazy proxy for a heap of other things (e.g. if I spend a year solving a problem, then spend the next four years solving the same problem, is that the same as spending five years solving different problems?)
Gosh, so much! We’re about 300 more people than we were then, and every time someone new joins, things change. In terms of the culture - what it feels like to work here - I’m really proud of the changes. The really really valuable things are here and in some cases stronger than ever. Some less-than-ideal things have improved a lot.
It feels different but continuous, if that makes sense? In the same way that I’m a different person to who I was 5, 10 years ago, but still some essential things are the same.
The reason we are the People team, not the HR team, is because I think it’s really unhealthy to think about the actual people that you work with every day as being a resource in the way that printer paper or desk space is.
One fairly common conception is that HR is there to make sure the company doesn’t get sued, and therefore cannot be trusted to look out for individuals. In some places, I think it’s true. It really, really doesn’t need to be!
I don’t come from an HR background, so my instinct is to work things out from first principles and then look at the existing solutions - what do people need? what is the challenge or problem that we should solve? rather than what is the item from the HR menu that we should implement.
It basically comes down to listening, caring, and trying very hard to make things fair. A combination of empathy and process. Taking the collective of individual cases as data points, and working from there to build a structural solution. It seems to be working so far!
I said they were potentially interesting! It was a cool experience for me, and not something my school typically did. I really enjoyed hanging out at the Observatory every Saturday morning and getting to drive the stars in the Planetarium, and our cohort was pretty small (I think 20 of us on that course, aged 14 to 60-something) so I figured not that many people have had that experience.
There’s a standard for what we’re looking for, which is very very high, and anyone who is above that will move forward. We can afford to be incredibly selective, because we get a really high volume of fantastically strong applicants, and that’s partly why I think everyone here is in absolute awe of how great the people they get to work with are.
and sometimes wonder if you got in by mistake, I bet loads of us think it though
! Come and ask me really awkward questions at our 
