Compensation Bands That Candidates Actually Understand

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Complete: Structured Compensation Planning That Grows With Your Team

The Challenge

Compensation at a 100-500 person company exists in an uncomfortable middle ground. You're past the point where founders can make pay decisions based on gut feel and a quick market scan, but you're not yet at the scale where a dedicated compensation analyst and enterprise-grade systems make sense. The result is often a patchwork of spreadsheets, inconsistent offers, and pay decisions that feel arbitrary to employees—even when they're not.

This ambiguity creates real problems. Candidates push back on offers because they can't see the logic behind the numbers. Existing employees grow frustrated when they learn a new hire in a similar role negotiated a higher salary. Managers dread compensation conversations because they lack the framework to explain decisions clearly. For HR leaders, every pay review cycle becomes a time-consuming exercise in recreating the wheel, and the risk of pay equity issues compounds quietly in the background.

How Complete Approaches It

Complete is a compensation planning and communication platform designed specifically for startups and scaling companies navigating this transition. Rather than offering a stripped-down version of enterprise compensation software, the product was built from the ground up for organizations that need structure without bureaucracy.

The platform's foundation is helping companies articulate and implement a coherent pay philosophy. This isn't just about deciding whether to pay at the 50th or 75th percentile—it's about creating a documented framework that connects compensation to levels, roles, and performance in a way that's defensible and transparent. Complete provides templates and guided workflows to help HR teams define these principles, then turns them into functional compensation bands that can actually be used in day-to-day decisions.

What distinguishes Complete from spreadsheet-based approaches or broader HRIS tools is its focus on the communication layer. The platform generates visual, shareable compensation summaries that show employees where they sit within their band, how their total compensation breaks down, and what progression looks like. For candidates, Complete can create offer letters that contextualize the numbers—explaining equity in plain terms, showing how the offer compares to the stated philosophy, and making the case for total compensation rather than just base salary.

The leveling architecture is another core component. Complete helps companies build and maintain job levels that map to compensation ranges, creating consistency across departments and providing clear pathways for growth. For a 200-person company that's hiring twenty people a quarter, this kind of infrastructure prevents the drift that leads to pay inequity and employee frustration down the line.

Who It's Built For

Complete's sweet spot is venture-backed startups and growth-stage companies between Series A and Series C—organizations that have raised capital, are hiring aggressively, and recognize that compensation infrastructure is becoming a competitive necessity. The typical customer has outgrown informal compensation practices and needs something more rigorous, but doesn't have the headcount or budget for dedicated compensation staff and heavyweight enterprise tools.

The clearest signals that a company is ready for Complete include recurring friction in the hiring process (candidates questioning offers, inconsistent negotiation outcomes), manager confusion during performance and compensation reviews, or a looming pay equity audit that reveals just how ad hoc decisions have become. If your HR leader is spending hours before each comp cycle rebuilding spreadsheets and chasing down market data, or if employees are asking questions about pay that you can't answer confidently, those are practical indicators that structured tooling would add value.

What Customers Are Saying

Customer feedback for Complete tends to emphasize two themes: the speed of implementation and the impact on candidate experience. One G2 reviewer from a mid-sized SaaS company noted that Complete helped them "finally explain our compensation philosophy in a way that candidates actually understand," reducing back-and-forth during offer negotiations. Another review highlighted that offer acceptance rates improved once candidates could see a visual breakdown of their total compensation package, including equity.

On the internal side, HR teams report that Complete reduces the administrative burden of compensation planning significantly. One HR director at a Series B startup described the platform as "the difference between having a compensation strategy and just having a bunch of numbers in a spreadsheet." The ability to share compensation bands with managers—giving them confidence in conversations without requiring deep comp expertise—comes up repeatedly as a practical benefit.

Getting Started

Complete typically works with companies on an annual subscription basis, with pricing scaled to company size. Implementation is designed to be lightweight; most companies can have their pay philosophy documented and initial compensation bands configured within a few weeks, not months. The platform integrates with common HRIS systems, reducing duplicate data entry.

For companies approaching a funding round, preparing for a compensation audit, or simply wanting to professionalize their pay practices before they become a pain point, the onboarding timeline is reasonable enough to address immediate needs rather than being a multi-quarter project.

Key Takeaway

Complete earns consideration for mid-market HR teams because it solves a specific, common problem well: bringing structure and transparency to compensation without requiring enterprise complexity. For companies in the 100-500 employee range where pay decisions are increasingly high-stakes but dedicated compensation resources are limited, it fills a gap that spreadsheets and generic HR platforms struggle to address.

Learn more at complete.so